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

2Clix has withdrawn from a legal case against the founder broadband discussion forum Whirlpool. But it is not necessarily all is well that ends well. The legal question still hangs over Australian public forums as to who takes the legal responsibility for publically posted comments. This grey area still exists in the Australian laws.

Ever since news of 2Clix's legal action against Whirlpool founder Simon Wright first broke, the general opinion has been that it was, at best, a massive miscalculation. 2Clix's suit, which sought to have two threads discussing the effectiveness of its products removed from the site, instead resulted in global publicity of those threads. Those threads still currently dominate the top five search results for '2Clix' on Google, hardly a good outcome if you're seeking to minimise bad publicity. 

Companies that engage in such legal action against negative discussions need to also think about the flip side of the coin. If they can demand that negative comments should be taken down, then what if all of the positive comments go with them.