Follow The Pirate Bay’s Spectrial
By Morelli
The Pirate Bay is in court today, as previously reported, and the “spectrial” is being transmitted live. You can follow the proceedings via live audio feed and twitter.
If you haven’t heard of The Pirate Bay, it’s a site that searches, indexes and links to “torrent” files, metadata required to download content from other torrent users. The website’s operators are being prosecuted for 33 cases of assisting copyright infringement, charges they say are “idiotic”.
It’s an important trial for Internet rights, and has garnered almost a book of comments. The outcome will decide whether it’s a crime to have discrete packages of information related to the whole, because torrent users download small amounts of a song, for instance, from thousands of other users.
How many bits of a song are actually “owned” by the artist? It’s been shown that the same string of bits from any given song can repeat itself in many others, in digital format. So sharing 100 bits of a song constitutes a crime? Many argue that no, singing one note of a song doesn’t mean you’re doing a cover, or plagiarizing. The prosecution, however, says that The Pirate Bay is something like an accomplice to copyright infringement, rather than actually stealing content.
So what do you think? Is there any possibility of a conviction? Follow the spectrial, and spread the word!
Source: Slashdot
Monday, February 16, 2009 11:57PM
I doubt much will happen to them. If anything does though, all those torrent freaks will just need to find a new place to get their free stuff (which really isn't too hard.)
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 6:01PM
[...] of the charges have been dropped in the trial against The Pirate Bay. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall was unable to prove that his torrent evidence was directly related to [...]
Thursday, February 19, 2009 7:01PM
[...] of the charges were dropped against The Pirate Bay’s operators yesterday, the third day of the trial was marked by the prosecution presenting amended charges and the defense globally calling for an [...]
Thursday, February 26, 2009 3:00PM
[...] The Pirate Bay Trial is advancing rapidly, yesterday John Kennedy, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) explained how piracy was responsible for the downfall of the music industry, and declared the $2.67 million fine “justified and maybe even conservative because the damage is immense“. [...]
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 3:30PM
[...] two weeks of fast paced litigation, the Pirate Bay ‘Spectrial’ has come to a close. In the final days of the trial this week, the prosecution called for jail time [...]
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 3:30PM
[...] two weeks of fast paced litigation, the Pirate Bay ‘Spectrial’ has come to a close. In the final days of the trial this week, the prosecution called for jail time [...]