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Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday
Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."
Good for them for finally taking down these scumbags.
I guess it would be ok for me to take Open Source code and to close it to make it proprietary, release it on Bit-torrent with ads inserted in the program and not suffer an consequences.
I would like to call Pirate #4 to the witness stand Your Honor... Pirates on trial -- news at 6:00...in Somalia... -
damaged by dogma
When a law does more harm than good it needs to be abolished.
Similarly, please end drug prohibition laws.
ktnxbye.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some Swedish translators should add subtitles and put it up on The Pirate Bay.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
The trial is something of "shooting the messenger".
And the most obvious problem is that the music and movie industry did create this problem themselves by ignoring the customers and not providing the formats they wanted.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
And the most obvious problem is that the music and movie industry did create this problem themselves by ignoring the customers and not providing the formats they wanted.
"Free" isn't a format...
to the true spirit of freedom. This is the actual front for liberty today. What guts. Lots of talk, but not many are willing to take a stand like these guys.
First, I don't see how the report does any such thing. It certainly doesn't address this case specifically.
Second - It's an EU report. It does not have any status in the Swedish legal system. Swedish judges have to follow Swedish law and precedents. If current Swedish law does not 'correctly' implement EU directives, which is what that report is about, then that's a matter for the European Court of Justice. It's certainly not something which is decided in a Tingsrätt (Swedish first-tier court) case.
1) WOTDR
2) No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that for the most part, people would literally prefer free beer over free speech.
"Hey, I'll give you a free beer if you shut the fuck up about politics."
"Sounds great!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
This should've been included in that 'You Are Not A Laywer' thing the other day, about legal fallacies 'techies' make.
Understanding how bittorrent and bittorrent trackers work is quite easy. Heck, there are explanations in the newspaper all the time.
Given an explanation your average person can easily understand it. Judges and lawyers tend to be a bit smarter than your average person. Add to that that it's their job to understand new situations all the time.
I think that if you go read actual rulings in these cases, you might be surprised at the depth of understanding you can find.
For one, you could well go check out the Norwegian DeCSS case ruling, which the prosecution lost. The judge had no problems understanding how CSS worked, or what the consequences were for issues like competition and fair-use rights.
You'd need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know except myself - even a musician I know pirates other people's work), they pirate because they don't want to pay. Yes, they download music they wouldn't have bought otherwise (the "no lost sales argument" so popular with piracy apologists), but they also download all the movies and music they would have bought otherwise. It even hits cinemas, as I try to get mates to go to see a movie that might interest them and get the reply "downloaded it and seen it already."
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
TPB doesnt help promote free in that sense. What it does is give you content that supposedly stallman has some ethical objection to, for free.
Its a very thinly veiled justification for getting free stuff.
TPB is NOT a political website. It's a large advertising cash generator based on redistributing everyone else's hard work. Nothing more or less.
If you hate 'the mafiaa' boycott their movies. that is your right. It is *not* your right to take them for free anyway whilst waving some crap about freedom.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I think it does in aggregate. I know that for plenty of things I've pirated, I've ended up generating revenue for the people involved. For instance, I pirate a lot of books. If I like a book and it's something I think I'll want later, I'll go out and buy the dead tree version. I watch BSG on Hulu nowadays and generate ad revenue for the show (and when I have money I'll buy it on DVD), but I would never have gotten into it if I had started watching broadcasts in the third season. (Who's the woman in the red dress? What's a "frakking toaster"?)
Again, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that piracy exerts a net negative force on media producers, and that for everything I can think of that got money from me because of piracy, there are a gazillion things I might have bought but didn't. But it's not *entirely* bad for them, assuming the work is quality.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
wow.
so if crime B is worse than crime A, we ignore crime A?
Most people would consider murder worse than rape. Let announce a moratorium on rape prosecutions till we get the whole murder thing fixed shall we?
What drivel.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
don't make me laugh. If I set up business as the #1 place to go get heroin, and just tell people where to go when they knock on my door, how well do you think such a bullshit defence will stand up in court?
People come up with some amazing bullshit to justify getting free movies don't they?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
No, but it's not all about being free.
Consider, for example, the Daily Show. I want to watch it on my computer. Americans can just log onto the Comedy Central website and watch it on their computers, without paying a penny. But I'm not American. In my country the distribution rights are owned by a different broadcaster; they also have an internet site where the Daily Show can be watched for free ... but it only works on Windows, and I don't use Windows.
So I have, at times, used TPB to acquire copies of this program to watch.
Was it illegal? Yes. But was it immoral? I don't think so. I'd have got it for free anyway; TPB just provided the same free content in a format I can actually use.
Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable.
eBay provides links to stolen items. I guess they're accomplicies to burglary and robbery.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Piracy doesn't hurt sales. Content that isn't worth the money it's being sold for hurts sales ;)
well, I can tell you where to hire a lawyer who knows how to circumvent the law using many loopholes... does that make me an accessory to crimes ? does that makes YOU an accessory after I've told you his/her name ? :-)
what in god's name has happened to society ? ever heard of word of mouth ? TPB is like it... only in written form
justice is what you make of it, not the same for everybody...
Immaterial Property laws are a long way from perfection, that's why courts should give a BIG BREAK to anyone suspected of infringement of such laws, until there are good reasons and evidence that has really hurt the business... much like the cigarette-cancer link, if you wish...
I downloaded xvid / divx torrents of DVDs I already owned because ripping the content myself, and therefore bypassing CSS protection, would breach UK law.
I have 150 DVDs on an external drive which I watch movies from. I don't want to have to watch 15 minutes of trailers and warning before each movie, and I don't want to have to search through the collection for a disc which may or may not be too damaged (through use) to actually work. It's a matter of convenience. They have my money, I have my useable product. Why can't they leave it at that?
Anon for obvious reasons.
They have, as I understand the local law (I live in Sweden), not broken any local laws. I am not entirely sure if they have violated some EU law or not. The international pressure to find them guilty seems to be huge, so they may be convicted regardless of there being no violation of any local law. I find it really disturbing that they will probably be found guilty due to immense international pressure from governments and corporations, it sets a very dangerous precedence if you can get tried and convicted without having done anything illegal if enough powerful entities think that what you are doing should be illegal in your country.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
For most people it isn't about free as in beer, but rather, as Richard Stallman might say free as in freedom
........
I think slashdot can serve as a good example of how complete and obvious bullshit can be earnestly believed and endlessly repeated with total conviction by thousands of otherwise intelligent people. Please spare a second to think about whether what you just said is really true or are you just automatically repeating something you hear so many times here. Majority of people go to pirate bay in order to download free stuff that otherwise they would have to pay for. Simple as that. Nothing to do with freedom. If you want to get worked up about freedom there are plenty of issues for you that are far more important than some restrictions on DVDs.
If I purchase a movie then I expect
You can expect anything you like, including but not limited to a free vacation on the international space station and an erotic massage from Natalie Portman but that doesn't mean you have any right to. There is a difference between desires and rights. Movie studios (to take one example) make a movie, hence they set the rules for how that movie will be sold. You are free not to buy if you don't like those rules.
The only reason we have crap such as "license agreement" is because of lawyers and lawsuits and consumers who are too meek to grow a pair, stand up, and demand their property rights.
Not exactly clear on what you mean by property rights here. On one hand you say you want the "rights" to share the movie with your friends, on the other hand you acknowledge that public distribution is not included in those rights. Well the issue here (as in with regards to the pirate bay trial that we are talking about) is in fact public distribution. I don't think movie industry really has a problem with you sharing it with a handful of friends, it's more of a technical problem of how to allow you to share it with your friends but not with the rest of the world. The problem with that, which is almost too obvious to even have to spell out and yet so many people don't seem to get it, is that if you have the right to freely share your movie with everybody in the world through a widely available, simple to use and quick download it would mean that only one copy of the movie will ever be sold, which means than no movies can be made with any expectation of profit, which means that almost no movies will be made anymore.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Well that's a bit of a dumb argument. Heroin is illegal in most countries, it demands a high price because it's a rare and difficult to obtain product. It's also distributed by a relatively tiny percentage of the population.
Naturally the cops are going to want to know how you know who has the stuff and what the link is, if any. You make the damaged assumption that possessing or making available some particular piece of knowledge to anyone that asks is automatically a violation of the law.
You: Where can I find some heroin?
Me: I don't know, google it.
Am I going to get shit canned because I directed you to a search engine with the exact links to what you seek?
Even if the vast majority of people are lazy and self centered, which is more convenient:
a) Downloading pirated material with inconsistent quality, inconsistent file names, under threat of being caught
b) Paying a reasonable fee for the same service with no quality issues
Even the most unscrupulous person would choose the latter. The industry is NOT providing the consumers with what they want.
Even the $1/MP3 model doesn't work properly. My friend just got close to 100 GB of music from his uncle. It would have cost him something like $30 000 legally (I don't know the exact number of files) and hundreds of hours hunting each album down, even though most of the music is just sitting there waiting to be randomly shuffled to and possibly favorited. That music does NOT have an economic value of $30 000 to one person.
One fair way would be to offer unlimited tracks in a Free format for a subscription fee that supports the artists proportionally to how much they're played.
What's better? Everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting 100 files or everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting unlimited music. Who would lose in such a deal? No one gets any less money.
I don't use the pirate bay, but I also refuse to buy legit copies of anything. They're all made by a bunch of assholes that want to restrict our rights, so why support them with my money?
My Sig: SEGV
Obviously you can't stop it, so what's your point? I didn't see anyone cry for workers of paper mills, printing presses and typewriter factories when computers replaced paper. Nobody asked for subsidies or started rent seeking when their vacuum tube factory was obsoleted by transistors. They could have argued that transistors where simply making money off the ideas of vacuum tubes so they deserved their share. Everyone would have laughed at them because the progression was more obvious. Either they can either retool their "factories" or they can sell them. The problem with most publishers is they don't even have any factories, they just move money around while taking more then their fair share. That's why they are resisting so much, they have nothing to fall back on. Well if they didn't have the foresight to actually provide some sort of investment, then maybe they wouldn't be in this situation. Instead they leach talent from all over the world, use whatever media manufacturer is cheapest and higher a publicists when needed. They kept doing the same thing they've been doing since the Beatles while the rest of the world started embracing the internet. Now they can no longer monopolize the market so they want to make competition illegal.
"What about downloading stuff that the local television networks are too cheap to buy themselves"
If you want to see movies that arent on TV yet, buy the DVD. Or rent it. or borrow a friends DVD.
Don't think you are magically entitled to have every piece of entertainment delivered to your eyeballs for free the minute its finished.
Your last statement is just "everybody does it". Hardly an excuse. Is that how you judge how to behave in society? You just do what everyone else does, regardless of the harm your actions have on others?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Since always. That's how you decide whether to buy something or not: Whether you feel it's worth the price or not.
Deciding the worth of something has -always- been the work of both parties. Something is sold when both parties can agree on the worth. Sometimes 1 side feels the got a better deal than the other, and sometimes they both feel the deal was fair.
Occasionally, in situations where the market is a monopoly, one side will feel they didn't get a fair deal. In luxury goods, this is never true because they aren't forced to buy it. If they part with the money, then it was obviously worth it to them.
The above poster is trying to say that piracy never affects the system I've outlined above, but he's wrong. There are some people who pirate that would have bought the game had they not been able to pirate it. How many is up for debate, but I think it's relatively few.
Why? Because if nothing could be pirated, the person wouldn't have money for everything. Even if everyone pirated things, the amount they could each afford compared to how much they pirate is miniscule. They actual money lost is nothing close to the 'worth' of the goods pirated for the simple fact that pirates don't have unlimited money, but they can pirate isn't limited. (Online isn't the only way to pirate, remember.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It is not. At most, it hurts an obsolete business model. The "recording industry" is not artists, is not art and is not music: it's publishers. The recording industry is in the business of providing up-front recording costs, promotion costs, production and distribution costs to artists.
With the advent of cheap computers and open-source software you can record yourself for a few thousand (even a few hundred) dollars. up-front recording cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With internet sites like myspace, plus the ease and near costlessness of having your own site, it's very possible for artists to do their own promotion. promotion cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With the internet an artist no longer has to "produce" a physical product, so "production" costs are zero. If they want to, they can do small-run CD's for relatively small money. production cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
Still with the internet, If the artist chooses to truly embrace what the internet can do for them, they can distribute via bittorrent, reducing their bandwidth costs substantially. or, if they still want to sell their bits, there are plenty of on-line music retailers that will sell for them. distribution cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
The final note on this, is that while the recording industry provided these up-front costs, they were 100% recoverable. In other words it was a loan to the band. If the album sold, the record company made it's profit, and the bands profit went to repay the loan. Most bands don't make any money selling albums: they make money on tour.
Bottom line: do not confuse the (very loud) group talking about the end-of-days with artists. There was music before these dinosaurs showed up, and there will be music after they go extinct.
You have not related any relevant personal experience, and if you did/could it would be anecdotal at best.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
What does porn advertising have to do with anything?
Google provides links to infringed copyrighted content. So does Pirate Bay.
Google makes money from advertising. So does Pirate Bay.
OOoooohhhh! But Pirate Bay's advertising is PORN!!
Oh, well. That settles it, then. We find the defendant guil-cup of the charge of accessory to copyright infringement.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Why? Because google links to other than copyrighted material? Well go ahead and punch yourself in the face. The comparison to google is not stupid, it's not identical since no fucking comparisons in the world are, but it's close enough to make a point, which you don't get. This makes you stupid my friend. Now go troll somewhere else.
I am the lawn!
You know what? Most people are honest. Most people accept that they should pay money for things they use/want.
This is the problem with the *IAA mafia types. They assume everyone is dishonest and treat them as such.
You know what I love? The $5.00 bin of DVDs at kmart, best buy, or walmart. Some older movies, sure, but some that I've wanted to watch and never did.
Now, this is the absolute truth and I'm sure 99% of the people will agree with me.
I want a way to get a movie or some music, in a format I want, I don't want it locked with DRM, and I want it at a reasonable price.
I sometimes watch a movie on my computer, sometimes on my TV, sometimes I stop it on one and continue on another. Sometimes, I want to watch it a few months later.
In the case of kids movies, I want to be able to put it on my iPod to keep her quiet on long drives.
If the movie and music industry actually kept up with the times, they would realize that all the terrible "downloaders" are actually potential customers. Analyze the market, adapt, and capitalize on the opportunity. Don't just try to sue and legislate!
Why do you think that Pirates Bay is on trial and Google isn't? Pirates bay specializes in piracy, Google only snaps up those links because it's indiscriminate about what it indexes.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Or time to...you know...start paying for software.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
You are a unique snowflake and definitely not in the majority of users who pirate movies.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
You are in the minority. Loss of revenue to piracy is a real problem and trying to justify piracy by saying that you ended up buying the product later isn't an excuse.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Pirate Bay specialises in what other people tell it exists. Google trawls everything, looking for itself.
/. if everybody posted links to iso's of the latest Windows release.
In many ways, this makes Google more culpable, as it is doing all the legwork. TPB is just a forum where people post links.
It'd be like shutting down
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Novels are more difficult, but not impossible. You can go with the subscription base model, where you sell in installments to an aggregator (i.e. magazine with a subscription base). Or you can make custom novels like some chick selling the custom Valentines Day romance novels.
Then again, physical copies of books are a premium item - difficult to digitize (well), and many people prefer the physical form. Writing prose to sell paper does seem odd.
I'm not for abolishing copyright; I happen to rely on it in my own work (I'm a professional engineer and when I create a plan, it's for a single installation of a building unless I have a contractual relationship saying otherwise). There are speculative building designers too - you see them in all the home stores as "plan books." I would like to see it drastically curtailed; 5 to 10 years should be the limit, imho. If you can't make your money in that time, you should do something else. Of course, I'm also for compulsory licensing of patents at fixed/sliding rates so that any patent can be freely reproduced. The monopoly production then is not a barrier to competition, but the developer gets value for their work - it just may not be the lottery-windfall they are hoping for.
IP laws are supposed to be for the public good, not for the wild enrichment of the creators. If it takes you 20 years to develop and produce a single patentable item that requires another 20 year monopoly on production, maybe you're really not good enough at that particular craft to warrant using it for your entire means of support.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
it would appear that the primary concern of the RIAA/MPAA is whether or not they are being paid for other peoples' works.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Or time to...you know... get copyright back to something that at least resembles its original intent, at least in the US. There's no reason whatsoever to justify the Beatles recordings still being under copyright, for instance.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Last time I checked, advertising porn is not illegal.
for everything I can think of that got money from me because of piracy, there are a gazillion things I might have bought but didn't. But it's not *entirely* bad for them, assuming the work is quality.
Being out of work: -30000$
Doing stray jobs: +2000$
See, being out of work isn't *entirely* bad. Uhh how not?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thoreau wrote, "When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow." It is not only our right, but our duty to disobey and unjust law. Making a law irrelevant and useless due to the sheer number of people disobeying it is one of the key factors in eliminating that law.
See the separate-but-equal laws, alcohol prohibition (juries nullified over 60% of prohibition cases toward the end), slavery (ever hear of the underground railroad?), and so on. Disobedience of the law has a long and dignified history, and so-called pirates are the latest in a long line of people working toward changing bad laws.
No, but DVD is an awful, user-abusive format.
Ever heard of "user prohibited actions"?
Yay, I'm forced to watch previews on a movie I paid for. And I can't skip the FBI warning. And I can't skip the stupid menu animations. How about region coding that generally forces you to buy a more expensive copy that you don't actually own?
The alternative is to download a DVD/blu-ray rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
DVD and Blu-ray couldn't compete even if they were free.
Free may not be a format, but a non-DRMed data files are a blessedly versatile format whereas DVD & Blu-ray is incredibly restrictive by comparison.
Question everything
No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer.
I'm not so sure that's true. As iTunes and the like have demonstrated, there are large numbers of people who are quite ready to pay a reasonable price for digital music that was professionally produced, well-organized, and delivered over a high-quality connection.
After all, iTunes provides value. It saves me time spent hunting down music, and I know that I am going to get high-quality for my money. And so, yeah, I'm willing to pay for that, and it turns out so are many other people.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
That's one of the reasons I don't have such a problem with copyright infringement is that copyright has become so stupid.
Remember that in the US copyright was originally 14 years or rather 7 + 7 (7 when you registered, extensible by another 7). Now this was seen as good enough back when the world was large. By that I mean it took a long time for information to move. If one wrote and published a book in New York, it could be a long time, years perhaps, before someone on the west coast got to buy it.
Now the world is very small. Information moves instantly across the globe. It is trivial to release something to the whole world at the same time. IT is easy to reach all your potential audience very quickly.
Well if anything, you'd think this would mean shorter copyrights. However it hasn't. Copyright is now life plus 50 years. Apparently just being able to sell your work for your entire life isn't good enough, you need to be able to keep collecting money after you are dead.
Now that's retarded especially since the Constitution doesn't grant unlimited right for copyright. Congress is allowed to create copy right law to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." The whole reason they are allowed to do it is because we want to promote science and art. So that means you give someone exclusive rights for a time so they can make money, and thus have an economic incentive to create. However it does not mean they should have rights for an unlimited time for three reasons:
1) If someone can release one thing and use that as a gravy train for life, what is the economic incentive to keep creating? In other fields, people must keep working to keep making money, why should art be different?
2) It stands in the way of progress. Part of the progress of the arts (and science) is building off of that which came before you. Disney is a great example, some of their most beloved movies are based off of old fables. Well if people can't do that, it stands in the way of progress.
3) It runs contrary to the Constitution which says "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Note the "limited times" part. It doesn't say forever. The idea here is you get to have exclusive rights for a little bit, then everyone gets it, like with patents.
So given the absurd state of copyright law, I have trouble thinking that those that break it are all that bad. Copyright law has reached a totally bullshit state, and a bad law really shouldn't be a law at all. If copyright was more reasonable, well then maybe I'd be more willing to condemn those that break it. However as far as I'm concerned current copyright law is downright unconstitutional and thus should be struck down.
filesharing = heroin
People will come up with any analogy to justify their perceived moral superiority, won't they?
You are in the minority.
Got a verifiable source for that blanket statement? I'd venture a guess that you're wrong, but I'll start with simply saying that I disagree with what I can only construe is your opinion due to the lack of any sort of reference to back it up.
Loss of revenue to piracy is a real problem and trying to justify piracy by saying that you ended up buying the product later isn't an excuse.
No it isn't a problem. And as far as the artist is concerned, yes it is a fine excuse.
Just two days ago, I ended up ordering three new CDs with two bands I would neither have heard nor considered buying anything of, hadn't I first downloaded some of their stuff and listened to it.
So, I downloaded copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holder. I also ended up buying it all at full price.
You may see this as being plainly wrong.
I see it as a conflict between antiquated laws and a technological society that has moved on quite a bit since the laws were written. And of course, it doesn't help that a panicking industry, tightly locked into equally antiquated business models, is flailing about wildly, lobbying here, suing anybody and everybody there (not caring one iota about evidence or due diligence) and more or less causing quite a bit of harm everywhere.
We obviously disagree.
I wouldn't bet on "your side" in the long run, however.
The world has moved on.
Whoa cliffski's on another over-generalized anti-pirate (note that I didn't say anti-piracy, this is more personal) rant.
I have paid, over and over again, cash money directly into big media's financial fortunes; people like you who come along and accuse all pirates of being freeloaders who expect "magic entitlement" is a pretty narrow view of the situation.
I'm so tired of being ripped off by media in the form of DRM, inability to copy tracks from, say, my xbox to my pc, etc. You, however, consistently fail to recognize this in your posts.
I don't know what your vested interest in content is, but it's obvious that as the situation progresses, it's really getting your ass in a cramp.
I would suggest you attempt to break out of that mindset you're in and perhaps pick up a few books about sociology and psychology; for an obviously intelligent person you're missing a hell of a lot about the human side to this problem.
"Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable."
No, they wouldn't.
Courts take intent heavily into account when rendering judgement on a defendant. Google is a general purpose search engine... they index everything, with no other intent than to make money by pulling the public in to use a superior method of search. They don't condone criminal activity, nor directly assist in it.
The Pirate Bay is different, because of their stated mission: to undermine copyright law, and to encourage copyright violation, and more importantly, provide direct assistance in doing so. Come on, they have a page on their site dedicated solely to mocking companies that send them cease and desist letters on their piracy. They pretty much openly say "Ha ha, you can't get us, and we're going to continue to do it anyway. Fuck you and your copyright". These guys make no bones about what they stand for and what they're trying to do: eliminate all copyright laws and protections, period.
So, these guys are screwed. What defense can they use? Sweden has weaker copyright laws than most of Europe and the US, but they do have some, and there are penalties for breaking them. What can they use as a defense? Certainly not "we didn't know what we were doing". They've been up front all along about what they were doing, and why. One of the founders, in a television interview, looked directly into the camera and said "we're going to keep on doing this and you can't stop us. We know it's illegal. We don't care".
Not even Swedish judges can overlook that.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff?
This is why the adult industry has done so well on the internet: they're smarter than the average businessperson.
Just because lots of porn is available illicitly doesn't mean people pirating it won't also pay for it. If someone gets hooked on some site's material, and can't get everything they want illicitly (not everything is available, and it's frequently hard to find), they may very well turn to paying the $20/month or whatever for a subscription, because it's a lot easier than trying to track it down on all the sites and places where people trade illicit copies. It might not be a majority of pirates, but it's still enough for a nice profit.
Mod parent up. The adult industry (or at least the vast majority of it), seems to understand that people will buy some stuff and pirate others. If anything is heavily torrented on the net, it's porn. Tons of it. I certainly download tons of it. And from that, I start to notice certain girls that I'm interested in. Faye Valentine, Scarlett Pain, Jenna Haze, Eve Lawrence, etc, etc. The list goes on for a long time, and it's a list that I've formed primarily from seeing these girls in pirated content. That said, once I notice a girl that I like I'll had on over to IAFD.com and look up what movies she's been in, and in particular, if she's done any scenes with another girl that I particularly like. Due to the sheer volume of porn produced, a lot of the videos that I lookup like this simply aren't going to be on a torrent site. Sure it has a lot of porn, but it doesn't have THAT video. So, I head on over to a Neflix-like subscription service that I pay for, and put the movie in question down in my queue. Once it comes in I rip it, and send it back. I also subscribe to a pay website that posts random DVD's each day (5 per day specifically, split by scenes), and will download stuff off of there just fine.
Now, here's the thing: I'm not paying for every little piece of content I obtain. It doesn't work that way. What I AM doing though, is putting, along with many other people, plenty enough money into this industry for it to survive, and make a healthy profit while doing so. Porn companies make up for this with relatively low production costs, but honestly, their pay is much closer to reality. Most of the female talent makes a few thousand tops for a movie. Virtually nobody is going to pull more than $25k-30k, but then again: why should they? Why should Tom Cruise make $15+ million for working on a movie for 4-5 months? Sure, it's because "he brings in that much in revenue", but that's only true because of the artificial nature in which copyright law has propped up that whole industry. Allowed to run a natural course, an actor's salary would actually start to look sane again. Now, a lot of the big name blockbuster's like Titanic wouldn't be possible without such strict copyright laws, but honestly, why should we legislate people's freedom's so strictly just so that we can get heavy special effects? People put on plays, and did it well, for centuries before the video camera was invented. They certainly can continue to do so with a video camera rolling, and still product plenty of content.
The music industry is even worse. There, music quality is simply a measure of the talent of the artists. You don't need particularly expensive budgets simply to lay a good track down - you simply need good talent. Again though, a talented musician shouldn't magically make 300x what a talented carpenter makes simply because the carpenter has to deal with the unchangable laws of nature while the musician gets carefully crafted laws to make sure he (and only he) can keep copying his now infinite resource.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think their defence will be more like "we're going to keep on doing this and you can't stop us. We know it's legal and don't care how many big companaies wish it weren't."