The famous and infamous Pirate Bay has recently lost its legal battle in which the site’s owners are accused of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. However Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström who were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD), after a trial of 9 days, will appeal against the verdict. The website to date has been unaffected and remains online.

The Pirate Bay verdict appears to be achieving the opposite to the outcome intended by the copyright advocates with support for the site and its political offshoot, the Pirate Party reportedly going from strength to strength.

Future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bittorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler which uses no centralized server, making it harder for authorities to track and prosecutions be braught against any one body of focus. Anonymous VPS services such as iPredator, will also offers file sharers protection. So its an ongoing arms race.

Piracy

Just when I’d thought most ill conceived internet censorship laws, New Zealand tops them with this one.

Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act forces the removal of material from websites following any accusation of breach of copyright, even if it was not proven. However, it is up to the ISPs to play proxy policeman.

It is a growing trend of governments worldwide to force ISPs to do their dirty work in censoring online discussion and to pay lip service to large corporations. Something I predicted over a year ago.

But the question that remains to be answered, is whose side will the ISPs take?

Our politians (law makers, a good joke) are lacking any real understanding or education when it comes digital society which shows in the headline grabbing polices they tout and hair brained legislation they are ever so quick to ram through their assemblies without any informed community consultation.

Much of these numb skull ideas seem to be pushed by the major media outles. I have increasingly seen “journalists” complaining on their media websites about the blogsphere appropriating their content. I agree it is only fair that original source be cited. However, these same whining journos say nothing of the fact that modern journalism is increasingly turning to and drawing from the same digital pool that bleat about their content disappearing into.

“Airline passenger tweets about jet crash landing“, “Facebook community protests change in TOS”, all make it into the mainstream media these days.

More on the situation and community action can be read in this article… if it hasn’t been removed in breach of copyright that is.

NZ blogs in copyright law blackout demo

Chrome condition of service that effectively lets Google use any of
your copyrighted material posted to the web via Chrome without paying
you a cent.