apropos of nothing

The Entertainment Business’ War on Piracy Is Practically Won

Courtesy of thepiratebay.org

Great news for content owners everywhere today as the Wall Street Journal reports that prosecutors are close to filing charges against the operators of Swedish BitTorrent hub the Pirate Bay with conspiracy to breach copyrights. After years of lobbying from the MPAA and the RIAA, the Swedish government finally seems to be taking action against the file-sharing site, in spite of its massive worldwide popularity.

TPB claims it isn’t breaking any laws, since none of the actual illegal files are hosted on its servers but instead on the computers of BitTorrent the world around (it’s billed as a search engine for pirated material), but, according to the WSJ, “police, prosecutors, and entertainment-industry lawyers say the distinction is bogus.” We’re not completely sure what, technically, makes TPB all that different from Hype Machine or even Google’s Blog Search function, where we commit much of our piracy, but we salute the entertainment business on its noble pursuit. Once the Pirate Bay is no more, and prosecutors subsequently emerge victorious in protracted legal battles with Mininova, isoHunt, SUMOTorrent, myBittorrent, NewTorrents.info, Monova, Vuze, SeedPeer, BTJunkie, and millions of other sites exactly like them — and supposing that no other file-sharing services sprout up in their absence — the war on piracy will have finally been won, and at last we can all go back to purchasing CDs and DVDs at the store, as nature intended.

Showdown Looms Over Pirated-Media Directory [WSJ]

The Entertainment Business’ War on Piracy Is Practically Won