Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion

Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"

Comments

Re:Yep

[MightyMartian]

The idea that the media industry should be different than any other historical industry is quite beyond me. The printing press pretty much killed one of the most ancient occupations of literate civilization; the professional scribe. I'm sure lots of scribes were pretty pissed that some asshole German and his machine not only stabbed their profession in the heart, but did it with what was really a substandard result (look at illuminated manuscripts and then look at the Gutenberg Bible, it's the 128bit MP3 of its day!)

No occupation or technology is guaranteed infinite supremacy. No law can do it, not without extraordinary harm. Late feudal Japan tried banning firearms and other forms of modern warfare to stave off the collapse of the feudal system, and then by the Meiji period was bringing in every foreign expert they could to bring them up to speed before they became a two-bit colonial rape victim like China.

What I'm afraid of is that the anti-P2P movement will become like the War on Drugs, an unwinnable contest, but one with sufficient amounts of money being made by the so-called enforcers that they'll just keep trying to stop what they know they never can, under the strange idea that if you can criminalize enough people, somehow they'll eventually stop.

I think every country should adopt a new clause in their constitution; the "Stupid Ideas Tried Before Clause" that would have anyone who passes a law to try a scheme proven one or more times to be unenforceable to be removed from office permanently.