Pirate Bay Founders Jailed.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Piracy will never be stamped out while there is a situation where:

• There are separate release dates for albums and films in different countries.
• Albums are released on CD and then withdrawn for years while various claimants bicker over the copyright.
• Pricing is based on greed rather than cost.
• A cheaper product (CD/DVD) costs twice as much as a far more expensive one (cassette/video tape) in order to artificially maintain a market for the latter.
• The music and film industries keep fighting meaningless battles against their own consumers instead of embracing the new technologies and finding fairer ways of making money.

[The Red Fox]

My main reason for having downloaded songs from internet is I have no way of hearing them before I buy them on a format (mp3 or vinyl). I would suggest offering a free, full stream in low quality as a preview and then offering a high quality download for a reasonable price, perhaps different quality files at different prices (e.g 320kb/s mp3 would be cheaper than FLAC). I also want to see separate release dates, regional price differences and formats abolished. Brits keep getting ripped off when it comes to film and music prices and I'm bloody sick of it.

The music industry has never been able to keep up. Piracy may or may not go against your views/morals, but if it has done one thing it has made the music industry pick up and pay attention. They can either adapt to modern business models or go bust. And if my prediction of the CD going the way of the dodo is correct, they will have to. People are moving away from physical formats, and again, the industry has no one but themselves to blame for not keeping up.

I don't ever see and end to copyright infringement, it has always existed (home taping, bootlegs), but it wouldn't be on this scale if customers had the options that can be provided now with the internet. Oh, and stop releasing shitty, bland, samey pop music all the time. Get creative artists signed and you might actually see an overall rise in sales again.

[Psi Wavefunction]

I think a major change the internet has brought was a liberation of informational 'stuff' from its physical substrate -- while ideas, and intellectual creations, where always shareable and copyable, taking an item of information meant the other party no longer had it, due to its sole manifestation being on a physical item (eg. a disk). Now, you can take information without depriving anyone else of it, and the law, along with many corporate business models, are still too outdated to realise the fundamental change. Charging for information no longer makes much sense, since no one is deprived of it during sharing. Money must be made in some other way, and the successful companies (and laws, eventually) will be the ones that realise this and adapt, rather than fighting the inevitable.

All [non-classified] information is now fully free. While information always had a life of its own (you can tell I'm of the 'memetic organism' school of thought... ok, it's just me, mostly, not much of a school ), now it just became even more blatant. Copyrighting makes as much sense as patenting genes -- and is as controversial of a concept.

There's still ways to make money, but you can no longer churn out 1-good-song-10-shit-songs albums based on name along. The model has change fundamentally, and the sooner they realise this, the sooner they'll figure out a way to harness the changes in their (and most likely our) benefit.

Japan doesn't copyright its anime characters in the same way America does -- the fanbase is allowed to use them and make fan-made comics (doujin) (even for sale), artwork, etc. This enables a much deeper fanaticism for an anime series, which enables them to sell much higher volumes of merchandise and other fan services. Americans stomp everything down with copyright bullshit, and look where their animation industry is at. It's all about assessing the situation, and adapting to it wisely. In that scenario, the Japanese anime industry found a good compromise, and prospered. Rigidity (dogma) was never good for adaptation...

[Animavore]

Sweden: hundreds protest Pirate Bay conviction

By LOUISE NORDSTROM – 17 hours ago

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Wearing bandanas and waving Jolly Roger flags, hundreds of supporters of file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay demonstrated on Saturday against a Swedish court's conviction of the Internet site's organizers.

The Stockholm district court on Friday sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom to one year in prison each for helping millions of Pirate Bay users commit copyright violations of movies, music and computer games.

The court also ordered them to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to international entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The entertainment industry applauded the move, calling it a landmark decision protecting the rights of those whose livelihood depend on creative activity.

All four defendants have vowed to appeal the verdict.

The rallies against "judicial murder" occurred in Stockholm, Goteborg, Karlstad and Lund and were organized by The Pirate Party. The political party, which supports free file-sharing for noncommercial use, said its membership rose by more than 20 percent to about 20,000 after the court announced its verdict.

Police spokeswoman Birgitta Nilsen said at least 500 mostly young people were protesting in Stockholm alone, many supporting the Pirate Bay defendants by wearing bandanas and carrying skull and crossbones flags.

The Pirate Party does not have any formal ties to The Pirate Bay, but has expressed its support of the site on several occasions.

Party Chairman and founder Rickard Falkvinge received loud cheers as he addressed the black-clad crowd at the Medborgarplatsen square in downtown Stockholm, demanding that the defendants to be freed from the charges.

"The establishment and the politicians have declared war against our whole generation," he said, calling on "file-sharing for the people."

The Pirate Bay doesn't host copyright-protected material, but directs users to content through so-called torrent files. It has an estimated 22 million users worldwide.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD97KVRAO1

[leo-rcc]

The pirate bay people get jail time, meanwhile the actual pirates in Somalia holding people hostage at gunpoint we have to release again after capturing them.

[Woodbutcher]

The pirate bay people get jail time, meanwhile the actual pirates in Somalia holding people hostage at gunpoint we have to release again after capturing them.

The Somali pirates' money comes ultimately from us, the companies tack that onto the merchandise. Pirate Bay money comes from future profits that the shareholders would get, it hits the big shots in their own pocket. Can't have that. WE don't count.

[Trolldor]

"Lives depend on creativity"

Fuck you, you're the cunts who copyrighted Hendrix decades after his death to leech money off of his work.

[ScholasticSpastic]

That's awful. It reminds me of the new laws here making the possession of anything "which could be useful to a terrorist" illegal. That's anything at all.

That's only too true. My favorite thing about having minored in Chemistry is that now I can feel all MacGyver-esque because most homes I walk into contain all the components required to produce a crude explosive device. Or more nefarious things which discretion doesn't allow me to mention.

Can't even purchase a decent chemistry set for my son anymore.

When protection trumps freedom, we've gone down the rabit-hole.