Hollywood demands shuttering of Pirate Bay
Site sails on despite conviction
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Hollywood is asking a Swedish court to deliver the killing blow against the The Pirate Bay now that its four co-founders have been found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement.
Although the owners of the notorious BitTorrent tracker face prison time and hefty fines, the sentence handed out in April did not include an injunction forcing the site to close down.
Now a coalition of studios including Columbia Pictures, Disney, NBC, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Viacom is demanding that the website be shuttered to protect the illegal distribution of roughly 100 films and television programs. A writ to sue for closure was presented Monday to the Stockholm District Court.
"They've been sentenced to prison for criminal activities but haven't stopped carrying out those activities," Monique Wadsted, the lawyer for the studios, told Sweden's The Local.
The injunction doesn't request damages for alleged copyright infringement, although the studios do ask for compensation of court costs. They also named Pirate Bay bandwidth supplier, Black Internet AB, in their lawsuit.
Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde, along with site financier Carl Lundstrom, were sentenced in April to one year in prison and ordered to stump up a combined 30 million kronor (~£2.5m, $4m) to the entertainment industry.
The group unsuccessfully tried to appeal the sentence based on allegations that the presiding judge was biased because he was a member of the same pro-copyright groups as several of the entertainment industry reps in the case. The judge was cleared of the accusation in June - although it's expected the Pirate Bay group will appeal the case again on other grounds.
Presently, The Pirate Bay will hand over its keys to Sweden's Global Gaming Factory X for roughly $7.7m, which plans to implement a yet unspecified, non-criminal business model for the torrent tracker.
Wadsted told The Local that her clients welcome the change, although she added, "but we can't wait and see." ®
COMMENTS
Choose your pain
Pay for copyright protected works or be heavily fined and go to prison. The choice is yours.
@ As long as the perps go to prison it's all good
"Hopefully the perps will learn a lesson or two while in prison."
Like the lessons learned by other political activists; the ones that were incarcerated in the 60's and 70's? Like, how to interoperate with the public telecommunications network without being noticed? Like, how to embezzle and launder money almost as good as an elected politician or media mogul? Like, how to bribe/threaten a foreign country to implement laws that circumvent the populace's rights to better match your business model? Like, how the Real Illegal Ass.'s of America™ do piracy and copyright infrngement?
Yep, there's lots of lessons to learn while staying at the pleasure of His Majesty of Sweden...
wHollyWeird wants the world...
Let's face it, guys. wHollyWeird want the world and, as Jim Morrison, another notable Merkan who was bent on self destruction, put it, they want it now. Beside the fact that TPB have indeed sold out, it's worth remembering that the death of one technology didn't stop the birth of another, nor did it stop the setting up of new organisations ready to provide it.
It all comes down to supply and demand. If the supplier demands too high a price for their product, or they supply an inferior product, the demand goes down. If a product can be got another way, for what the product is worth, people will pay that amount. Charging what the market will bear, a basic economic principle, is something wHollyWeird has long since forgotten, along with basic entertainment concepts such as originality. No wonder people don't want to pay for it!
Yet we hardly ever hear of companies from elsewhere in the world taking such steps. Don't be mistaken, they do it, but they don't prance around like primadonnas like the Recording Arse of Merka. But then many of them tend to focus their energy on targetting the real perps, not middle-men like TPB or their end users, so they tend not to look like prize wankers.
So, to Columbia Pictures, Disney, NBC, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Viacom, my only suggestion is to consider removing the bugs from their collective sphincters and start considering what realistic measures they can take to embrace the tech they scorn so much while they still have an audience.
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