Since the outrageous takedown of Napster in July of 2000 I have frequently thought that the day must come when someone points out that killing the service providers is no more effective than killing the messenger.
Enter Sweden, bastion of the beautiful blond bombshell and refuge of the information elite. Wired has published an article highlighting the success of The Pirate Bay in repelling repeated attacks from the MPAA. Swedish law says that because there is no copyrighted information in the .torrent files distributed through TPB the MPAA has no legal grounds for suit. The Pirate Bay, in fact, is merely a specialized search engine, and this has been my argument since day one.
Counter-argument: would I be so adamant about the legal standing of a site providing a similar service for child porn?
Response: yes.
That’s not an easy one, obviously. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the hub could be used to track down the file owner who is breaking the law. And the MPAA is doing just that, using the services to pinpoint targets for suit even as they take action against the services themselves. It begs the question: if all the specialized services were successfully shut down would they then tackle Google, being our next obvious search tool? Google isn’t going away to appease the movie people, I promise you.
The precedent has been set.