Joho the Blog
|
|
|
« Microformats gets a push, or is it a pull? || Back to Blog | Susan Crawford explains Net neutrality » June 02, 2006
The Swedish Criminal Police yesterday shut down PiratesBay, a popular site where people posted torrents, many of which were copyrighted material. From this we can learn two lessons: 1. Even though PiratesBay hosted no content of its own, providing the metadata that lets people download illegal content apparently is as illegal as providing the data itself. 2. If there are doubts about the legality of your site, don't include the word "pirate" in it. [Tags: torrents copyright piratesbay digital_rights] Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 2, 2006 02:42 PM
|
Comments
I guess another lesson to be learnt is (as in this case) if the government shuts down your site, just move it to another country (Pirate Bay now operates from the Netherlands) where the legal process has to start over again.
Just a question: are there any safe havens (like the Cayman Islands are for finance) for sites like the Pirate Bay where there is no protection for intellectual property?
Posted by: Atle MK | June 5, 2006 04:55 AM
Here's another lesson: if you have to use a weasely modifier like "apparently", it is not a lesson.
Posted by: Branko Collin | June 5, 2006 09:34 AM
BTW, here's a blog post by Piratbyrån's Rasmus Fleischer in which he discusses the "metadata is the cartel's target" idea. (Being the target of pressure groups is not the same thing as being illegal, as you seem to wish to suggest.) Piratbyrån is the organisation that founded The Pirate Bay.
Posted by: Branko Collin | June 5, 2006 10:18 AM