"The Pirate Bay has always argued that it's a tracking site, not a hosting site."

That's not so much an argument as a statement of fact. If they were hosting, they would have been charged after the last raid.

May I please have some of what these legal wankers are smoking or using , for what ever it is it seems to induce total wowserism and instant stupidity "Peter Principle" style !!

acording to pages on there legal threat page

http://thepiratebay.org/legal

they said that under the law in there country you have to prove damages to clame it this clame is obvoiusley a load of bonley

http://thepiratebay.org/blog/102

I love these guys <3

Fine calculated on the number of downloads of those 24 albums...

Once again the assumption that everyone who downloaded the album would have gone out and bought it. It's almost enough to make me start downloading music to prove a point. When are they going to get it into their heads that music piracy is not the same as going into HMV and stealing the damn CD? Maybe if they sued at 0.5p per track or something which might reflect the actual lost revenue people might have a bit more sympathy.

Paris knows they are misguided.

I should be entitled to royalties of £25 billion.

who read "The International Federation of the Pornographic Industry"

that industries like this and the MPAA, RIA are brought down and dismantled the better. The problem though is that it is companies like these that employee idiots that are in politics when they leave, which should be a big conflict of intrest. Especially since they are the ones who make the laws.

Long live Guy Fawkes

"who read "The International Federation of the Pornographic Industry""

nope

and was I the only one who was disapointed when I re read it?

But isn't that just the problem? The fact that somehow institutions like the RIAA have been able to twist the long acceptable technical difference between hosting and tracking into being the same thing in the eyes of governments, the law and often even the media?

I remember years ago back in the mid to late 90s you'd get laughed off the internet if you said someone had broken the law for linking to copyrighted material hosted elsewhere. It was clear a link was merely a reference and not itself copyright infringement but somewhere between them and now the lines got blurred.

From what I remember (and this is hazy so apologies if I'm wrong on some of the facts) it started with the idea that if you linked to an image as part of your page but that was actually hosted elsewhere it was actually classed as infringement, whilst I don't agree that using other peoples images in this way without their permission is exactly moral, I also don't think it should be copyright infringement or whatever it is classified. At the end of the day if you put a picture on an open web server unrestricted then you're giving permission to people to access that, if others link to it there are technical countermeasures available to prevent specific or entire groups of sites accessing it without going through your site first. Of course when these kind of precedent got set however it wasn't much of a stretch for the likes of the music industry to start applying it to links from say a US site to say a Chinese site actually hosting pirated content where at the time pirated content wasn't illegal to be hosted in that manner via HTTP in that country.

Of course the age of peer to peer followed and then again it wasn't a far stretch for the same figures e.g. the music industry to apply this same line of thinking to peer to peer.

The reason Sweden still treats linking as legal is because it does have technically competent regulators being a very high tech. country that understand the issue on a technical level, however even Sweden looks to be at risk now to idiocy and corruption getting it's way over intelligence and common sense.

I think there's a lesson to be learnt here and that's when it comes to enforcing new laws on the internet the default should be to default to the option that offers most freedom to the general masses as if you give even a little leeway to those willing to control the internet it wont be long before they extend that and start applying it much more broadly. A similar example is in some countries where filtering of child porn sites is being abused to filter sites governments don't agree with, whilst it's nice to think that child porn should be filtered it's not as clear cut when that could lead to censorship abuses. This is particularly the case when you factor in the argument that filtering child porn doesn't actually magically make child molesters go away and point out that perhaps it'd be better if police actually went and found child molesters rather than simply masked the problem over with a filter.

no content required

If every download was a salethen radio stations are responsible for around two hundred times the lost income due to piratebay. Admittedly they do pay some compensation to the record companies but even less than allmymp3 did on a listener per record basis. Perhaps the government should ban use of the fm band in an attempt to encourage music sales...or three radios you're out...

Mine's the one with "Home taping is killing music" on the back.

Posted on April Fools...... never take blog posts seriously on April 1st! :)

Yeah, it is an april fool's day joke.

I wonder if this latest piece of IFPI idiocy is an april fool's day joke too...

Internation crime cartel (IFPI, RIAA, MPAA) trying to steal money every way they can. The Pirate Bay is the robin hood of the internet. One nice idea for the "bay" will be to figure out a way to accept donation to artists. If enough people are giving out, (and the artist actually get the money) this will prove once and for all that you don;t need The Digital Mafia (RIAA MPAA IFPI) at all. The Digital Mafia only goal is to STEAL MONEY from both the consumer and the artist.

Forget about terrorism, war and high has price, the most dangerous on the planet is the DIgital Mafia

You know, I'm a big fan of bittorrent too, but have always wondered about the hosting vs. tracking argument from the legal standpoint. Its fairly clear that in the law, they are equally prepared to punish people who don't actively commit a crime but just facilitate the commission of a crime by others. Its the difference between a murder charge and a charge of conspiracy or aiding and abetting or whatever. (Yes, yes, technically they just commit a less serious sort of crime rather than no crime, blah, blah, blah...)

While the Pirate Bay boys can put their hands on their hearts and say they don't host any IP that belongs to other people, it is equally clear that by operating a tracker they are facilitating the illegal acts of others. Whether that actually exposes them in their jurisdiction I don't know (by which I mean that I think a court should only consider copyright breaches where all the parties to the act are in the same jurisdiction, that of the court itself - is that even possible here? Are PB's servers still hosted in Sweden?)

And of course, if it needs to be said, IANAL.

If I recall, the indictment is for 'medhjälp' i.e. 'aiding and abetting' or being an accessory, rather than the primary copyright infringement itself.

That may hold up ... but I doubt the damages will. Surely the person or persons who were aided and abetted must carry the main responsibility and hence damage

How can the PB be accused of aiding and abetting over the supply of information?

So, if on a night out I were asked by someone where they are most likely to find the local dealers* and told them, would I be aiding and abetting that person? If some 16 year old* (even though I don't know his age) asked me where such and such a bar is would I again be guilty of aiding and abetting? If someone were to use Google maps to find the exact location of a Brothel* (after being given the address by someone else) could Google be implicated in the aiding and abetting of prostitution?

Surely then every parent/guardian/relative that bought their child/relative a computer that gets used to download unlicenced, copyrighted material would surely fall foul of aiding and abetting?

Everytime I let someone into my house I am making my physical CD collection available to that person (which, if they were so inclined, they could steal a coupe without me knowing) would that make me guilty of aiding and abetting or making available?

* Not that I know any dealers, under-age drinkers or brothels!!

q.Aiding and abetting?

a.Yes, everybody is guilty of something.

Expect the IFPI, RIAA, MPAA etc. to mount a take-over of the Vatican 'cos they don't want any competition in the guilt/punishment/absolution stakes, after all they've successfully managed it with the investigative/justice/political arms of the law enforcement and enactment bodies of most of the planet.

Orwellian 1984 anybody? Oops, should it be "1984"(c) - have I just infringed on the copyright of a book and a movie - or can you copyright a number, but that's for another DeCSS like topic.

The Dewey Decimal Classification also lets people find things also

If you look up the latest game to be released, you will find dozens of links to trackers on google, should they then be liable for aiding and abetting. the crime is not knowing something but actually using it. I can quite happily think about starting a cannabis farm, even buy the seeds and look up information on how to do it (all legal). It only becomes a crime when I actually start the farm up. The suppliers of the information and seeds cannot be prosecuted, just me.Likewise, the people visiting sites like the pirate bay can think about downloading, get the information. The crime is committed when they start the download/upload, the trackers cannot be held liable for someone elses pre-meditated act of piracy