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The Pirate Bay Is Back Online
Many readers have submitted news that The Pirate Bay is back online, operating for now as "The Police Bay." Writes one anonymous submitter: "Pirate Bay got new hardware, moved the servers abroad and used recent backups. So the only bad side-effect of this police raid is that hundreds of clients of the ISP PRQ still have not got their servers back from the police. When the police did the raid on Wednesday, they took Pirate Bay from Bankgirot's secure server room. Then they also took all the servers in PRQ colocation facility STH3, effectively disabling a lot of small companies. The connection between PRQ and TPB? - Same owners, nothing more, this is beginning to become a huge scandal in Sweden with coverage on TV and all newspapers 4 days in a row."
So soon they crowed victory, so soon will they be humbled. By the looks of things the takedown of the Pirate Bay was less than legal, and now with the 'Bay back online the MPAA must be feeling more than a little upset. Personally I'm of the view that the Pirate Bay was perfectly legal - they didn't carry any copyrighted works themselves, just as Google don't carry the materials they link to. What fun this whole affair will turn out to be...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Nice to see an illegal copy of Vista is number one...
Looks like the Swedish Police is making a free, wide and very positive campaign to favor the Piracy Party. I bet they will be getting a lot more votes thanks to this weird operation. Thank you Swedish police officers!
So, at what point does it become the responsibility of the police to do enough homework to make sure that their investigation dosen't harm many other businesses that are completely uninvolved in the search for evidence? What recourse do the other effected isp customers have?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I can only hope this is causing a huge scandal s Sweden as stated by the article. Can any Swedish readers provides us a synopsis of some of the reports on tv and in the newspaper?
From the IRC channel, it sounds like the new servers are located in the Netherlands with hot backups running in Ukraine. The MPAA just got rocked. If it wasn't so damn early, I'd drink to this news...
If it's turning into a major scandal, could this mean that people in Sweden generally don't think gestapo-like tactics are justified to take down a few people downloading video games and TV shows?
Next thing you know, you'll be telling us that talking about war isn't actually talking about peace, and that freedom isn't actually slavery.
It's been a long time.
..is available at YouTube. For some reason the police covered the cameras with plastic bags halfway through.
As an American who's disgusted with the current Copyright Cabal running roughshod all over everyone and everything, I'm glad there's somewhere in the world where this crap inspires the mainstream rage it should. GO GET 'EM.
What's it like in Sweden? What's a nice time of year to visit? Are there programmer jobs available? Do you still have that bikini team?
Be seeing you...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
There will be demonstrations in Sweden's largest cities this afternoon, condeming the actions of the Swedish police and department of justice in this matter. It is being co-organized by the Pirate Party, and the youth organizations of several mainstream parties from across the political spectrum.
In Stockholm it starts at 15:00 on Mynttorget (right by parlament). That is in 15 minutes so hurry!
In Gothenburg a demonstration will start at 16:30 on Gustav Adolfs Torg.
..cops does it take to change a light bulb?
50. One to do it and 49 to confiscate every other light bulb in the house as evidence.
Representatives from two major political parties in Sweden, Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet have filed formal complaints against the Minister of Justice and members of his staff.
This has increased the general publics awareness of The Pirate Bay and probably increased the number of p2p users.
A very nice shot in the foot for the Swedish Justice Dept., the police and our very "customer friendly" **AA organisations.
# ~: no sigs today
but if they are in the netherlands now, what is to stop the dutch police from doing the same thing?
yeah sure, it's a giant game of whack-a-mole, but isn't the lesson here to do to thepiratebay what was done to napster?
that is, when the riaa/ mpaa behead these entities, they go underground and become headless
that is: no central server. thus, napster morphed into morpheus, kazaa, edonkey, et al
which is the real lesson for the mpaa/ riaa: you don't kill this "infection", you only make is more resistant to your antibiotics
the mpaa/ riaa is breeding superpiracy
you would think that instead they would coopt the pirate bay, legitimize it
but no, they have to fight where it would be wiser to collude. they just breed a stronger foe, drive this behavior further underground, and not stop one bit of it, and just make it much more difficult to ever stop
their behavior is creating the culture of piracy. if they embraced and extended, instead of exterminate and berserk, the mpaa/ riaa would create a culture that would say "hey, this stuff is cheap, and high quality, and easily organized... why would i want to go to a bad quality copy of my media that is hard to find?"
surely they see that that is all they are doing, no?
they are digging their own graves
you can't fight technological progress
this genie is not going back in the bottle
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Judging from a traceroute, the servers seem now to be hosted in The Netherlands.
I'm a bit surprised, when the admins of TPB said in Swedish media that they will relocate abroad, I actually thought that they would move outside the EU.
Let's see how the Dutch officials will react to this; how long TPB will stay up before they try to take it down again.
In Chaosradio International #009 one of the maintainers of TPB called "Peter" mentions traffic data and server capability of TPB and also comments on the Pirate Bay induced traffic on the Swedish part of the internet. According to Peter, each of the Pirate Bay high end servers handles about 20000 connections per second. This kind of packet flow once brought the main router of one of the biggest Swedish internet service providers to its knees. The traffic volume to and from the Pirate Bay actually isn't very high, just a couple of gigabits per second. The induced traffic between the peers allegedly reaches 50% of the total Swedish internet traffic. Swedes can get 1Gbps connections to their homes and don't have to pay an arm and a leg for it. 100Mbps is quite common.
The interview also covers the political environment and the internet culture of Sweden, and of course the raid.
Feele-a shereeng seete-a Zee Purete-a Bey, vheech ves clused doon fullooeeng Vednesdey's reeed by zee Svedeesh puleece-a, oopened egeeen oon Setoordey murneeng under a deefffferent neme-a: Zee Puleece-a Bey.
Zee seete's perffurmunce-a ves steell petchy et loonchteeme-a oon Setoordey, despeete-a beeeng roon frum noo serfers in Hullund effter ell zee Svedeesh iqooeepment ves cunffeesceted. Bork! Bork!
Zee reeed, vheech ves cerreeed oooot et husteeng cumpuneees in Stuckhulm, Fästmunlund und Fästra Götelund tergeted oone-a ooff zee vurld's lergest seetes fur shereeng mooseec, gemes und cumpooter prugremmes.
It ves prumpted by a cumpleeent tu puleece-a frum Unteepuretbyrån, vheech represents zee Svedeesh feelm und mooseec indoostreees' cupyreeght interests. Bork! Bork! Bork!
Un infesteegeshun egeeenst Zee Purete-a Bey hes beee oongueeng fur munths. "Ve-a beleeefe-a thet ve-a veell be-a fuoond nut gooeelty," seeed Fredreek Neeej, oone-a ooff thuse-a roonneeng Zee Purete-a Bey, tu Ixpressee. "Ve-a ere-a gueeng tu cunteenooe-a unteel zee ferdeect cumes. A-yup!"
The changed the old logo adding cannonballs shooting from the pirate ship smashing a hollywood sign. Way to go my proud swedish brothers. I admire your balls! (ehm.. well you get it).
These news may be great for filesharing people worldwide. But from a political point of view the Piracy Party has not won until the the servers are back up on swedish territory.
Well, for the record, 2006_05_31.pdf.
And no matter what statistics anyone may have come up with (or forged), Bittorrent is just a highly efficient means of distributing perfectly legal stuff such as Linux releases, scientific lectures and speeches, or free renders. Much like a knife is a proven instrument for cutting food, rather than reason for suspecting an intent to kill someone.
BTW if the laws had teeth against some real ills of the information age, and if the authorities were similarly responsive, though hopefully in a more targetted way, against botnet operators perpetrating DDoS and spam, we wouldn't need to have discussions like these for more than a decade already...
The torrent files that the Pirate Bay hosts are, it appears, legal in Sweden. However, the copyright infringement being perfomed by the individuals who download those torrent files and use them to make unauthorised copies of other people's work is certainly not legal in Sweden.
So, what's the likelihood that any records they may have kept of who's been committing copyright infringement are now in the hands of the Swedish police, the Antipyratbyran, and indeed the MPAA?
Pretty high, I'd say. Expect more raids soon... but this time, targetting the people who are committing the actual crimes, rather than the people who are exploiting legal loopholes to facilitate them.
But do we feel safe that we used pirate bay? It's not insane to think that the police will follow up IPs of DLing torrents and use this as "reasonable" evidence to investigate further in other countries (USA for example), then take this as far as to taking down trackers or even tracking down single IPs and sueing/arresting people.
I like muppets.
Why not use the MPAA's bandwith?
http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_05_31.pdf
A .torrent isn't copyrighted and linking to copyrighted material isn't either.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Software pirates don't have guns.
This wouldn't have happened if those network admins were armed.
paintball
"The MPAA has a multi-pronged approach to fighting Internet piracy, which include educating people about the consequences of piracy" Is this going to be the old-school 'piracy == terrorism' line? I hope not; I'm look for a more SouthPark style: 'Here's X's private jet, notice anything? X used to have a Gulfstream 4, but now she's had to sell it and get a Gulfstream 3 because people like you used to download her music for free. The Gulfstream 3 doesn't even have a remote control for its surround sound DVD system. Still think downloading music for free is no big deal?'
Contributory infringement has to be direct, not indirect. Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.
The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.
That's interesting, they compare the popularity of thepiratebay.org (21st in Sweden by Alexa), with CNN.com (125th in Sweden, Alexa). Color me surprised: a swedish site is more popular in sweden than an american site.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
A torrent file is basically an "assembly instruction manual" for data file(s). Just as it's not illegal to distribute instructions for building a bomb or a gun, it is also not illegal to distribute instructions on how to create a data file. Actually building (or using) a bomb might or might not be illegal, but merely delivering the instructions on how to build it is definitely not illegal (at least in the U.S., so far). Just so with torrents: hosting the torrent files, distributing them, downloading them, that's all legal. Actually using the torrent file to "build" the data file(s) it represents is what is illegal, if the file(s) being (re)built are copyrighted.
If you want to start a website that does nothing but provide instructions on how to build bombs, you can do it. Even if every single person who downloads those instructions uses them to build a bomb and tries to blow up a packed church on Sunday.
well it was online... till we slashdotted it.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
Nice feral apostrophe, by the way. Haven't seen one of those for a while.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
The devil is in the details. In this case, "most of the western world" would probably disagree quite strongly on a) what constitutes infringement, b) how long works should be protected for and c) what the punishments should be.
For example, I doubt you'd find many people who think downloading a song that gets played ten times a day on free to air radio should be considered infringement. Similarly, you will probably not find a lot of sympathy for media companies claiming to be "suffering" from copyright infringement in the face of ever increasing profits and ever decreasing product quality.
Wow...you sure completely missed his point. Yes, they'll adapt their business models, to only produce those kind of shows that can make money even when widely pirated. His point is that this class of shows will include fewer, if any, good shows.
TV and movies are not like music, where the artists make most of their money outside of sales of the music (e.g., bands make their money from their concerts).
Piracy fails the "what if everyone did it?" test. When it is a small, underground activity, it likely actually helps music and movie and TV revenue, by acting as advertising. If it becomes the mainstream way of getting content, however, then it does make it uneconomical for the producers of content (except for news and for programs where the view interacts with the show, such as by voting on what contestants win or lose).
Quickly, citizens!
The Pirates have gone global this time. They can change their port with the tidal waves of mind crimes and its nefarious actions.
It's not time to save on resources. The criminals can move between countries in a matter of days.
We need the help of a new super-hero spotted in Canada previous week! Only him can track down the Pirates and sunk their ship of infringments around the Earth.
Support the fantasy! Don't let our dreams die!
Captain Copyright, our prays are with you. Save us from the Pirates!
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Why would they set one up? I mean, bit torrent is completely open. Anyone can get your IP when you download off a torrent.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
5) Slashdot sucks, because most people here don't see the immorality of file sharing, and don't see that incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money. We might actually be seeing the fall of good video programming. It may not exist in 10 years, except for amateur junk.
You were pretty good up to this point...
And I must say I support file sharing exactly for this reason.
I want mass media to die an ugly death!
Lost to me (although better than most other crap they put on television) still represents what makes me ill about television. Maybe I'm just bitter over "Enteprise's" failure or the cancelation of "Firefly" but I am disgusted by most cookie cutter music and lame stories that make no sense and waste millions of dollars to make movies and TV shows that are unoriginal and could be made by an ad lib script.
The only thing I bother today is Adult Swim on Cartoon network because of the imported Anime... Heck... My movie collection is nothing but foreign films because some reason... When you don't have kiss butt to a hollywood director and fix script problems with CGI and million dollar actors... You are forced to make entertainment the hard way. (Which is why I love fan fics remakes of star trek).
If these moguls lost quit making emo boy bands and crap movies... The world would be a better place.
If no one made money from art, then only true artists would make art... Plain and simple. Of course they'd be starving and need patrons like they did in the Middle Ages, but Da Vinci made quite a living without the need for copyrights of his work.
Maybe I'm an art house bourgeois uppity bastard who only like foreign films, but I'd like for one day in my life to be able to turn on the radio or TV and see something that is more than just "entertainment". I'd like to see art.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".
I suppose Used Booksellers are leeches in your eyes as well. Should we shut them down too?
incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money.
How does filesharing substantially hurt 24 and Lost? The shows have already aired and made their money by the time they get onto filesharing sites.
Honestly, if networks and cable companies would get together and allow rebroadcasting on demand of major shows, the vast majority of people would simply do that if they missed a broadcast. Or they could allow downloading of the show off their website, complete with commercials, in a time-limited "secure" format that would expire, say, a month after initial broadcast date, so as not to interfere with DVD sales. Most downloaders would probably go for something in pristine quality that would be easy to locate and download, over the dubious quality of an anonymous fileshare.
Anyway, the point is that this is not about making money. There are plenty of ways for them to make money off the internet with their shows, as they are beginning to discover. This is about control. The suits have shown over and over again that they resist any attempt to lessen their total control over the distribution of their product, even when it can make money for them. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Under Swedish law, what matters is your intentions in the act that constitutes a crime. Google or my electrical company has no specific intention in helping me breake the law. In the case of The pirate bay on the other hand you would IMHO have trouble arguing that they has no intention in helping people violate copyright laws. Exibit A, there logo, Exibit B, their name, Exib... eh, you get the picture.
Swedish police has more leeway in Sweden then in the US because we don't have any institution to audit them. In american police (at least judging from police movies, correct me if I am wrong) it is considered improper for somebody to investigate themselves and therefore there are special police units that investigates on the actions of policemen. Here in Sweden it is the same polices doing internal investigation as all other investigation.
Also when it comes to courts. In the US you have a right to be judged by your peers (in theory, atleast). In Sweden you have the right to be judged by your politicians - remember, those same people who apparently ordered the bust (which they had no right to do, as so many others have pointed out).
The Swedish legal system is a catch 22 when it comes to govermental responsibility. The police carries out the orders from the politicians, the police investigates itself if anyone complains that their actions were illegal and if that investigation shows something was not right the politicians get to judge whether it was right or not of the police to carry out their orders.
The MPAA, US government, and Swedish police took down the The Pirate Bay website. If I told you that was about to happen, you'd probably see it as a very bad thing for bittorrent file-sharers and Swedes.
Instead, the action has been criticised in Sweden, gained the pirate party a lot more support and publicity, and the website has been put back up within about 2 days. Now it's hosted in other countries, and if any of those countries attempt to take it down, you can bet that it will again get widespread coverage in the news.
The Pirate Bay has gone from being a website into an idea. The MPAA thought they could just take it down and that would be the end of it. Instead, it seems that any attempt to take it down just gets support for file sharers and causes copyright laws to be questioned. Other countries can take it down, too, but the Swedes have set an example - there will be political backlash every time someone tries to mess with The Pirate Bay.
I'm sorry, but pretty much everything in your post is wrong.
Contributory infringement has to be direct, not indirect.
No, contributory infringement is inherently indirect infringement, also known as secondary liability. Maybe you're getting confused by the fact that there must be an underlying direct infringement which is contributed to.
Napster, for example, was found liable for contributory infringement because they were aware of infringements on their system (having been expressly told about them by copyright holders) but nevertheless continued to materially assist the users who were directly infringers. All Napster did was to provide a technology and and index of links, remember.
They're not alone. It's actually not that uncommon to see linking result in liability.
Pointing someone to a computer that has a chunk of a file is indirect. Giving them that chunk is direct.
Also your example fails, because giving someone a file will not be contributory infringement, it will be direct infringement, in the form of distribution.
The difference is important - otherwise, your electical company, your landlord if you rent/your bank if you have a mortgage, the company that made your computer, the chair you sit your ass in to type, and the boss who pays your salary so yo can afford all the shiny toys, would all be guilty of contributing to infringement, since without them you wouldn't be able to infringe the copyright. Oh, and the government as well, since they regulate the telecom industry and provide the environment that allows you to do all these things.
No, for two reasons. First, the law differentiates between factual causes and proximate causes. For example, let's imagine that A negligently runs a red light and hits B. B can sue A, but he can't sue A's mother. A's mother is certainly in the chain of factual causation: if she hadn't had A, A wouldn't have hit B. But she is too far removed from the car crash for liability to stand.
Second, one of the elements of contributory infringement is knowledge of the infringement at the time of the contribution. It is incredibly unlikely that any of those entities will have the slightest idea what you're doing at the time when you download something unlawfully. Therefore they're off the hook.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
and you entirely missed his point. Which was: either those shows can begin to provide the content online for people who want to download it and watch it on a computer, or they can lose their ass to piracy. Most people are willing to watch a few commercials if they can download the show they want, when they want it.
Not everyone, myself included, has time to be at their TV everyday at a given hour to watch their favorite show. I hate to break it to you, the studios aren't making any money when people Tivo either. I suppose next you'll tell us all how horrible it is when people skip the commercials using their Tivo? They can adapt their model, or they can die. Someone somewhere along the line will figure out how to provide those "expensive" shows on demand, and they'll reap the benifits. If not the current regime, then whoever replaces them. Stop being so naive and stop eating all the shit the **AA throws on your plate.
24 and Lost won't exist? YES! YES! YESSSS!
*Starts pirating in earnest*
Wow...you sure completely missed his point. Yes, they'll adapt their business models, to only produce those kind of shows that can make money even when widely pirated. His point is that this class of shows will include fewer, if any, good shows.
I'm not exactly sure he missed the point. The central expression is "good shows". "Good" by what definition? Is he worried that humankind will not see the n+1st season of 24, x years from now? Or that he won't? I just fail to see the link between countable commercial success and some ill-defined, subjective definition of "quality" if applied to entertainment. Just look at what shallow, voyeuristic crap your general-prupose, mind-wasting TV program mostly consists of today. No imaginable change could make that much worse, in my opinion. But maybe someone can tell me why shows that have been designed with ~100% piracy in mind must under any and all circumstances be worse than those today?
TV and movies are not like music, where the artists make most of their money outside of sales of the music
How very shortsighted. Is this another law written into stone, not subjectable to change? An actor's public image is determined mainly by what role(s) he plays and what he says and does in public outside of movies, and not primarily by how much money his movies make. Of course, if an actor doesn't rake in cash with his movies, he won't play in many movies, but if NO movie makes box office money (assuming ~100% piracy), then the playing field is level again. Just think of how much money is made through merchandise. Of course, merchandising does by far not work for any movie, but as a matter of fact, the most succesful movies in term of box office nowadays are all movies with lots of merchandising potential (Star Wars, Matrix, LotR, Harry Potter, Spiderman, X-Men, etc. etc.). The actor can furthermore capitalize on his/her success in various other areas involving public appearance. Think of something, I'm getting tired of laying it down.
Piracy fails the "what if everyone did it?" test.
Examples like Apple's iTunes' success (and most TV consumers' laziness, btw) show that this scenario will remain what it is today: an industry scarecrow far from reality. There are (or could be) just so many more aspects to a movie or music CD than just retail price. If you can't compete on price alone, get ahead on other aspects. It's really simple, and does not even require a fundamental change of business model. This whole war of *AA vs. The World is nothing but the industry's struggle for a price monopoly irretrievably lost to file sharing. Now it's real competition, not just the pseudo-competition of Sony Music vs. Warner Records or Paramount vs. New Line Cinema.
In conlusion: Don't paint the future so bleak, it's just not going to be as bad as you might think. Don't just take current trends and extrapolate them without boundaries, you will almost certainly overshoot. There are too many economic realities which will persist even in the remote future. To change them, a fundamental economic change would have to happen as well.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The problem is, you're wrong with your bottom line:
The bottom line is this: copyright infringement DOES cause serious problems. It causes money not to go to shows/movies/etc. It causes creative ventures to be cancelled. It causes people to lose jobs (not just the stars who have money -- people like the crew that have little).
It's actually the copyright in the first place that causes the problems. It creates an unnecessary cartel of employment and jobs that hurts the rest of society. Art used to be about performance before the copyright cartel, and most of the works of art that people consider great were created under that system, not under the copyright system. Many of us believe, with well developed reasons, that the world would be better off without any copyright.
Yes, some jobs will be impacted. Jobs that needn't have existed in the first place, and that are essentially leeches upon the rest of us, like most lawyers.
Other jobs will be created, and in the balance, all of us will be better off.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I am supporting them as an effective pressure group to bring copyright law back in line with the desires of the people. Personally, as a commie, I'd rather see copyright being abolished outright, but for something more realistic, the Pirate Party programme (5-year copyright term, noncommercial copying unrestricted) sounds just about right to me.
Well, no, some channel doesn't. I did not buy a single cd in the 15 or so years prior to my discovery of p2p. Not one. Because the music I heard sucked and too many cd's were full of bad songs. 15 bucks for a single song is just too much.
Since p2p, I've been on a music buying spree. I'm finding music I love everywhere, download the entire cd, and then buy it direct from the artist. I like my audio uncompressed and in it's natural state, and most music lovers I know feel the same way. At first I bought from stores, until RIAA sued it's first kid. I immediately began boycotting RIAA affiliated stores and musicians.
The music industry is not losing money on piracy. They're making more than ever. What they *are* losing is the musicians they've been treating as slaves all this time. If they'd treated fans and musicians decently from the start, this would never have been an issue.
So that's the real-world result of 'piracy'. Musicians are actually getting my money for the first time since I was a teenager.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.
Gasp! Are you saying that American law isn't the supreme law of the world? Handed down by god himself to the puritans, so that they might convince the entire world of the immorality of nipples, pot, and sharing?
We have footage of police wandering around, and footage of cameras with plastic bags over them. Why no footage of a policeman putting a bag over a camera? In this country, CCTV cameras are mostly arranged so that if you try to disable one, you'll be caught on camera doing it by another.
I really want a still image of a policeman putting a bag over a camera that I can distribute far and wide.
Xenu loves you!
Unfortunately, the US seems to think that it can still play the superpower game, when in fact its more of a "first among equals" situation.
Remember, 95% of the planet doesn't live in the US, and isn't governed by US law or practices. With the international flow of information, etc, we can cherrypick our virtual location on a case-by-case basis. For example, want to criticize country A? Set up a server in country B. Want to criticize country B? Set up a server in country A.
Corporations have long been doing the "cherry-pick a jurisdiction" for all sorts of things, from labour to legal venue. They're pissed off because now the average Joe can and is taking the same loopholes.
Being relistic (I know, this is slashdot, so realism may be seen as extremely off topic), the whole **AA problem is the result of an industry that was, historically speaking, for most of its existence, a decentralized cottage industry, that for a short time, thanks to advances in technology over the last century, became a big, "manufacturing-type" business, and is now in danger of returning to being decentralized again thanks to further advances in tech, and people's refusal to let themselves be manipulated the way they used to be.
What are they going to do in 20 years when we don't need singers, actors, key grips, cameramen, etc. ... when everything can be simulated by a hobbyist sitting at a keyboard, and when virtual worlds have more grip than a "stupid linear movie"? The answer - they won't do anything - they'll be gone.
TV, movies and music are already losing people to the net, games, etc. This is because there are still only 167 hours in a week, and every hour spent online or playing a game is an hour less to watch TV or see a movie.
On a related note, Nintendo's Wii is probably going to hurt Sony's entertainment business as a whole, as its pitched at the general population, and will drag millions more to spend more time playing rather than watching Sony's library of movie properties. The idea behind blu-ray or an hdtv player in a console is to "tie in" other forms of entertainment. People are going to vote with their wallets.
If Hollywood wants to continue to compete, they're going to have to justify their access to the consumer's most valuable resource - time. So far this year, they haven't - their movies suck to the point where even downloaders don't want to bother, its a waste of bandwidth and disk space and TIME.
Like I said, time is your most precious asset, and what they want. Ask yourself this - will movie theatres even exist 20 years from now, when the average consumer will have a 10-foot wall screen, surround sound and immersive environments where people can meet, party, and play? Or are they going to go the way of the drive-in, bulldozed to make way for housing.