Monthly archives: February, 2009

…no…HAH…it’s wasn’t me…I would waste such large amounts of money on things far more tangible…women, tech, and cookware..

…but the prosecution for the the Pirate Bay trial? They dont have an excuse…

The 7th day of The Pirate Bay trials is at a close, but still continuing…although most definitely not in a manner we all expected.
I will give a very brief synopsis.

To give some background…The Pirate Bay is a search engine for what are called Torrents. A Torrent is a method of file sharing that is very efficient, horribly redundant, and well-known for controversy, since so many people share almost anything on it. The only trick is finding the files that allow you to request a download of these files…bit by bit, from millions of machines, all sharing their little piece of a larger file. Anyhow, this is the boring part.

The cool part is you can find ANYTHING. So everyone from the science fact and quantum everything reader (like me) to all those scary people you keep hearing about (The Asshat) can find anything they want on electronic media. The problem here is that the whole copyright thing…it’s not enforceable. You see, between all the people who believe that information, entertainment and education in electronic format should be public domain, all the clued-in users who see a free resource of material that they would never have access to read, listen to, or experience, and the rest of the utterly clueless people who’ve somehow managed to figure out out how to use torrents and could care less about what they are doing…well…that pretty much covers everyone…

…except for the entertainment industry and media publishers…who are pretty ticked off that they cant figure out a way to make money from all the copies of their material floating about on the internet. So ticked off and petty that since they can’t track and prosecute the people actually responsible for illegally distributing said copyrighted material, they’ve decided to go after the search engine that provides the absolute BEST method of ever tracking down the distributors…The Pirate Bay.

You see The Pirate bay doesn’t store one iota of copyrighted information. It stores links to torrent files, which are the actual method of both downloading and eventually tracking the distribution of said content.

One problem. The Pirate Bay is not breaking any laws, and since they aren’t in a country where the judicial system is going to be the least bit intimidated by the entertainment industry, the prosecution in the case to date is becoming something of an embarrassment to their profession.

An example? Hmm…lets start with dropping the ball so bad the prosecution had to drop HALF the charges on the second day of the proceedings.¹ We could go on to include how the prosecution has changed its charges almost every day since the second.² We could even go on to start laughing at them for continually introducing evidence that wasn’t given due process (they didn’t notify the defense)³…heh…we could even mention how most of the evidence was found to be fraudulent and greatly inaccurate.⁴

So these are the details on how to waste 2 years and a couple million dollars.

You see, two years is how long the prosecution had to put their case together, costing a loads and loads of money for a prosecution that any computer savvy 9-year-old could top.

Hats off to The Pirate Bay for teaching big companies that there are fights that aren’t worth fighting. The court isnt over, but it’s not looking bleak in the least for the world’s biggest torrent search engine.

-Tony

Related Stuff

Made me chuckle 😉 Yay for lolcats!!!

Very recently Facebook has come under fire. According to CNN, member backlash against Facebook began over the weekend after a consumer advocate Web site, The Consumerist, flagged a change made to Facebook’s policy earlier in the month.

Normally I would just chalk this up as standard corporate diligence-gone-overkill in the manner of so many other online services who are dependent on advertisement, and demographic statistics analysis for market firms….but this goes WAY beyond. This is an attempt to have free reign on even syndicated material. That’s right…even RSS/Atom feeds pumped into the site would be subject to these terms…which is why FB requires any RSS you import to be yours, so there aren’t any infringement issues with FB’s content policies. Anyhow, bottom line, it’s a trashy move and I am fully against it.

So what should we do? Personally I love the idea of a public forum where people can share themselves in a tasteful manner.
But then it becomes a business, is exploited for money, and corporate data mining and stunts in legalese clear a path for unnecessary publishing and usage rights to material that is in no manner owned by the business. Sure it could have been done if it had been thought of as a baseline policy…but this late in the game…bad for positive image. All this does is tell someone they have a chance to make things right by creating a competing social networking venue.

Here are some links.
The Consumerist
CNN
USA Today

Most importantly,a Facebook Group has done a very good job of making very clear all the problems within Facebook’s Terms Of Use changes.
People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)

The Suggestion area for Facebook’s Terms Of Use.
Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities