BleepingComputer.com: Judge Sentences Pirate Bay Employees

Le Shocking!!!

That's something to hear about...

Why this if they made the TV, Radio?!

And how about warez-site owners??? Can someone explain to me why they get away with it (or do they?)?

'cause all they do is create a place where others may to upload .torrent files. They probably know 90% of them is copyrighted, but it reallly is just to much work to delete those copyrighted (the pirate bay, gets about 1mill new torrents everyday). And, it wont be easy to track down these owners, and uploaders, as none keeps the visitors IP's in logs (probably on purpose).

Personally I think it was a bad judgement, because the judge for one is prt of a anti pirating group, and two because what they're doing is just indexing like the rest of you guys and girls said. let's just hope there is a re-trial.

I may be a tad bit ignorant here, but, if I buy the DVD set of Lord Of The Rings, or Star Wars, which then I would own at least that one copy of it, and decide to SHARE it with a friend who lives on the other side of the country so they can view it themselves, the easiest way would be with a file sharing site. I am not charging anyone for it, and I thought that was the basis of copyright infringement, charging someone or profiting from a body of work. Or am I way wrong and totally confused on the whole copyright thing?

Celtmaidn, its one thing to borrow someone your DVD-collection, and quite another thing to share it using internet. When you 'share' this DVD using a p2p-site, you allow other users to copy your DVD and thus are you infringing the copyright law when you do so even if you are not charging for it.

Please differ here. The main problem and something that was noted in the coverage of this case - was that the Pirate Bay was hosted in a country where the law allows for such moves and assistance. Most P2P / Warez sites are hosted in countries that do not have any set laws in regards to copyright and do not offer assistance much either. Warez / CreditCards etc pp is a whole industry with a huge amount of money behind. There is a reason for increasing Malware on the PCs.

Torrents can be legit and are a very nice alternative to slow downloads from some ftp / http servers and reduces traffic for those sites that offer their software for download as torrents. TPB may just move their domain to a country with less laws and the cat and mouse game starts over again. The music and film industry has not and seemingly will not understand the selfdrive of this new "hype" and is just inapt to act accordingly.

Some further info in no particular order:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez
http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/wa/Warez
http://www.alternet.org/story/12283/?page=entire
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078793/

-edit to add-

One also needs to bare in mind the laws in the country that the "offender" is located in. Some countries do allow for peer2peer software and such, others say its illegal. Some have stronger laws, some have more open laws that leave gaps for play when being trialed.

This post has been edited by Yourhighness: 30 April 2009 - 02:55 AM

This will change nothing...for every torrent tracker that gets shut down, even more pop up. Just today, the local news was reporting on the "shocking" revelation that people were downloading the new X-men movie off of the internet; it registered a negative 5 on my 0-10 shock meter...and just for kicks, I went on Google, typed in the movie title plus "torrent," and on the first page, I got six or seven torrent sites with the tracker file for the movie.

Its like stomping on a roach, and claiming you house is now roach free...as soon as you turn off the light, twenty more will crawl out of the wall and continue getting into the food. The pirates will just move elsewhere...as long as people want bootleg material, someone will step up and provide it.

And, as stated by others, the site merely indexed the torrent files...it never hosed them. Google does the same thing (as I demonstrated). Should the record companies and the movie industry sue Google as well? You know that they'll fight any lawsuit like that to the death.

I can't understand how public libraries have been able to get away with it for so long... Sharing copyrighted material.

Vaerli, on Apr 26 2009, 10:53 PM, said:

I'll second this. Obviously there are those who pirate stuff just for the sake of pirating, but there are times when I've used bittorrent for what might legally be considered piracy, but I would consider acceptable.

Consider this scenario: You've purchased a music cd, but you've through accident scratched, cracked, or otherwise rendered the disc unreadable. Do you see it as fair to download the ISO (or MP3s) of the CD that you rightfully purchased?

Another scenario: You've built a computer, with a full version of Windows XP Professional. Three years down the road, your hard drive fails, and you've lost your original installation discs. You still have a valid license, yet your only option at this point by the letter of the law is to buy another copy. Using a torrent however, you can download the full image of XP Pro, and burn it to a DVD, and reinstall with no problem.

And on another note, to those who think that BitTorrent = Piracy (not necessarily anyone here who's posted), let me mention the many legitimate uses of filesharing.

• Independent musicians releasing their own tracks without having to host the files
  
• OS Distributions such as Linux
  
• Podcasts and other distributed media (e.g. Revision3)

I don't see why more companies don't take advantage of it personally. Microsoft for example, is putting up the release candidate of Windows 7 on Tuesday. As it stands, they will be serving all the files themselves, and at around 3 GB per download, if they get millions of downloads, that's an astronomical cost for bandwidth (not that they can't afford it ;) ), whereas if they set up a few dedicated servers, put up a tracker, and allowed others to share the distribution, it would take the strain off them, and also allow theoretically for higher download speeds.

Not everything is pirating, I can agree with that, K-Pock. And there are some things where torrents are legitimately used, as I have seen. An example is through one of the games I used to play, which is Company of Heroes. Recently (maybe within the past 2 months), they moved from using raw .exe's for patches and moved their home site to using torrents (of course, you are still able to download the raw .exe's from another downloading vector that they have listed on their site). This provides a more effective way of distributing their patches quickly if you'd like to use a program like BitTorrent.

For the music part, I can more or less agree. The OS part, I'm not sure on that at all. I'm not familiar on the laws behind it, especially since I've been hearing conflicting issues with it. Some say that you're allowed to have a "backup copy" so long as you own the original media (or whatever the term is) for it. Others say that you can't download at all.

Bleh....this is a good reason why I didn't go into law...

Haha yeah scff, law is a pain. Great example with Company of Heroes, though. Another plus is that even if they stop hosting the file, or went out of business the files would still be available as long as there are seeders.

The OS part though, as far as whether it's legal, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. It's a question (to me) of SHOULD it be legal. The backup copy thing is only legal if it's a copy made from your disc, if I'm not mistaken. Even if it's bit for bit the same thing as what you would download.

Its beyond their control if a PERSON wants to share a file thru torrent. What they can do is track us one by one

Depends on the law of each particular country.