And, last week the founders and owners of Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement and :

The Stockholm district court on Friday sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom to one year in prison each for helping millions of Pirate Bay users commit copyright violations of movies, music and computer games.

The court also ordered them to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to international entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

While many of us may turn down our noses on the illegal DVD guys who stands at the street corner and hawks his illegal DVD’s – most of us have used p2p file sharing – either mule or torrent – at least once. There is a certain elegance to it. Every copy is as good, there is very little chance of getting shoddy goods, and its a great way to sample and figure if you want to buy the damn thing.

As someone who creates copyright, I am fairly certain that the way around ‘pirates’ or ‘piracy’ is not going after an Areca Nut with a sledge hammer but look at the technology, and embrace it for distribution and reach and figuring how to make money out of it.

Studio’s and IP owners need to understand – that P2P downloading is here to stay. That most people don’t think it is wrong, or even criminal to download something that they haven’t paid for. At the same time, you are also talking about a generation that thinks that corporates have what is coming to them 🙁

And, finally, in a P2P set up – everyone is a pirate. There is the person who uploads and puts up a tracker. But, the way the file moves across the universe is that – a whole bunch of people, like you and i , have clicked on that particular file – for example – and are dowloading it – not from the central server (there isn’t one) – but from each other’s hard disk.

So if the Stockholm 4 can go to jail for ‘copyright violation’ then so can you and I. The question is how do you track trillions of bits of data being transferred across millions of computers in the world without seriously trampling human rights.

The Stockholm Four

Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Carl Lundstroem were convicted of infringing on film and music copyrights by making them available over the Web.

The question to ask is, if they made it available on the net, but no one downloaded it, would they still be committing infringement of copyright ?

Corporations have to ease up with the vindictiveness with which they are going after people and sites like this. This is not a bunch of counterfeiters sitting in dark alleys making rip-offs for profit. These are people who are not doing this for profit. They are doing this because they believe – rightly or wrongly – that corporations have become inflated, bloated and greedy and that they are doing a ‘social service’ by ‘liberating’ content. However, misguided the 4 might be – the fact remains it is difficult to see them as criminals. It’s a bit like sentancing someone who threw a shoe at a politician to jail. It’s in the same space of idiocy.

It seems like another David v/s Goliath …. and i can’t help cheering for the Davids …even though i am a copyright owner 🙂