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The Pirate Bay, Featured in Vanity Fair
koregaonpark writes "Via the TorrentFreak site, an article in the latest issue of Vanity Fair about BitTorrent, movie piracy and The Pirate Bay. The Vanity Fair piece is lengthy, and covers the MPAA's struggle to stamp out piracy, Hollywood's increasing losses, and how the 'heartfelt testimony of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli,' didn't help one bit. 'Pirates of the Multiplex' covers the saga of Pirate Bay in a very high-level, mass-market fashion. Did you ever think you'd be reading about TPB in Vanity Fair?"
But I thought it would be an article about Kiera Knightly's vagina, not copyright infringement.
Single page version.
/. doesn't just link to these where available, I will never know...
Why on earth
The first major blow to the anti-piracy lobby was when the courts ruled that collecting IP addresses was a privacy violation.
The second blow was when the courts fined a guy that was engaged in sharing movies. The big point was that they didn't send him to jail. By Swedish law for a search warrant to be issued, the suspected crime must be punishable by jail. So no search warrants for copyright infringements.
The third blow was that the courts found that electronically collected evidence was not enough for a copyright infringement conviction. Hard evidence was needed (computer hardware with the violating media installed) - which was not possible to obtain because of the previous ruling.
The pirate bay spectacle has come at a huge political cost for the involved. The former minster of justice Thomas Bodström is facing hearings suspected of "ministerstyre" - as a minister putting pressure on civil servants, something excessively illegal and unconstitutional. It's major league stuff.
Furthermore the pirate bay case according to almost every legal analysis is non-existent. They didn't even have any copyrighted material on their server - just torrent links - which is not against Swedish law. So why hasn't the case been dropped? Because everybody got so scared over the political shit storm came down crashing following the raids last year. Nobody involved wants to touch it and much less admit that it was because of political pressure. So the prosecutor is pushing on with the case although it is blatantly obvious to everybody that there won't be any convictions.
If this all above makes you think that the battle is over and has been lost by the anti-pirating lobby, well, you'd be wrong. Swedish law is much less precedent based than for instance US or UK laws. The text of the law is more important than previous cases and you need a shitload of precedent before it becomes relevant. Right now we have something that amounts to anecdotal evidence. The anti-piracy lobby groups are trying to get convictions that would go against the existing precedents and it is not entirely impossible that they will succeed.
The political situation is a bit different as file sharing is really on the march in Sweden. Some 1.2 million were estimated in 2005 and 2.5 million in 2006. That's a lot for a population of 9 million. You can't make nearly a third of the population criminals and the politicians have recognized that. Through that and because of the pirate bay scandal all the Swedish major parties have expressed the wish to find some form of general solution (a tax of some sort has been suggested) for both allowing people to freely download and for the artists to get paid. While this is far from being implemented, the idea of a "war on piracy" is very dead. The anti-piracy groups will do their thing but they can't expect any political support.
Of course, Shakespeare died in 1616, and the first English copyright laws that had anything to do with authors (as opposed to stationer's copyrights which had more to do with publishers and censorship) didn't arise until 1710. And I don't know where you're getting the idea that there were perpetual copyrights as a fairly ordinary matter. So before you point out the mote in the previous poster's eye, perhaps you should attend to the beam in your own?
-- 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.
Looks like you are my nemesis in this thread. I shall now go on to dismantle this comment.
If we look at 2005 and 2006 we can see that the number of tickets sold in 2005 was down 8.9%. It rose only 1.4% in 2006, although the number of movies released was something like 10% greater. Thus there was actually a net loss in tickets sold per film.
You have presented evidence that, in fact, people are going to see movies less, in an attempt to show that they are going more. Nice work there, sport. Perhaps you should be a slashdot editor.
Also, a rise of 1.4% after falling more than 10% (total) over the past three years, with losses each year, does not a trend make. So I'm not sure what you were trying to say anyway. But actually looking at the numbers in some useful way would have shown you the folly of trying to use the statistics to support your untenable position.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"