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The Pirate Bay Blockaded (Part 1)

5/10/2012 3:50:22 PM

Legal actions in a UK court look likely to block The Pirate Bay to UK internet users. Mark Pickavance examines the likely response and impact of these actions

Torrent site The Pirate Bay is never very far away from controversy, as its penchant for providing easy access to copyrighted content hasn’t gone unnoticed by those that own the films, TV, software and music in question.

Description: The Pirate Bay Blockaded (Part 1)

They’ve therefore headed to the courts in an attempt to redress the balance, and obtained a ruling that The Pirate Bay and its user base are involved in infringing copyright, and this opens the way for ISPs to be asked to block access to the site.

British High Court Justice Arnold said in his February 21st ruling that The Pirate Bay had gone ‘far beyond merely enabling or assisting’.

‘Despite their ability to do so and despite the judicial findings that have been made against them, the operators of TPB take no steps to prevent infringement,’ he continued. ‘On the contrary, as already explained, they actively encourage it and treat any attempts to prevent it (judicial or otherwise) with contempt.’

The final ruling on The Pirate Bay, and the possible sanctions that might be applied will be determined in June, but until then the site is under notice that action will undoubtedly be taken.

Is this the beginning of the end for the download culture, or is Justice Arnold another in a long line of overly ambitious judicial representatives that want to bring law to the lawless?

Content Owners Rejoice

With some harsh words for The Pirate Bay and those that use it, Court Justice Arnold’s ruling went down well with the content owners.

BPI (British Recorder Music Industry) CEO Geoff Taylor said, ‘The ruling helps clarify the law on website blocking and we will now proceed with our application to have the site blocked to protect the UK’s creative industries from further harm.’

The reaction from The Pirate Bay was to announce that it was changing the way its system works, making its removal and the tracking of its clients significantly more difficult. It’s also moved to the Swedish .se domain, so that US authorities can’t seize the domain using the powers that ICE (Immigration and Customs) has been provided.

As an odd aside to this story, the American film industry representatives are bringing legal action against Google for not page ranking iTunes above The Pirate Bay, typically missing the point of how these systems work.

After Megaupload was also recently removed, are those that enable the distribution of copyright-covered content on the back foot now?

Description: Justice Amold. He believes that to ‘sanction, approve and countenance’ copyright infringement is enough to make you liable. He also thinks he’ll succeed where many before him have failed so comprehensively.

Justice Amold. He believes that to ‘sanction, approve and countenance’ copyright infringement is enough to make you liable. He also thinks he’ll succeed where many before him have failed so comprehensively.

Lessons to be learned

The Pirate Bay isn’t the only high-profile website that the content makers have targeted recently. Megaupload was recently shut down and its owner Kim Dotcom arrested. The raid that captured him in New Zealand also netted two high-performance sport cars, a couple of sawn-off shotguns, a small collection of valuable art works, and $8m in various accounts.

These events weren’t entirely met with a positive reaction, especially from those concerned about the unilateral nature of Kim’s arrest and potential extradition to the USA. Talking to the Guardian, a representative of the The Electronic Frontier Foundation, supporters of free speech online, said ‘If the United States can seize a Dutch citizen in New Zealand over a copyright claim, what is next?’

That’s been answered now, but why was Megaupload targeted, and what was the consequences of its removal to overall infringement?

The statistics on Megaupload were quite amazing, not only in the number of visitors but also in the a mount of data it held for download. Before it was shut, Megaupload had 25,000TB of disk space, and typically saw 50 million visitors daily, making it the 13th most visited location on the internet. A number of analysts have suggested that it represented 1% of all internet traffic and accounted for between 30 and 40% of all download traffic. Therefore, removing it from the system would reasonably be assumed to have had a major impact, wouldn’t it?

According to a report by DeepField Networks called ‘Filee Sharing in the Post Megaupload Era’, in the hours after Megaupload was shut down, the internet showed a 2-3% reduction in bandwidth use.

Description: Kim Dotcom, attempting to camouflage himself as an expensive car. This didn’t work, and he’s due to be extradited to the US from New Zealand. But does this stop other people sharing copyright-protected content?

Kim Dotcom, attempting to camouflage himself as an expensive car. This didn’t work, and he’s due to be extradited to the US from New Zealand. But does this stop other people sharing copyright-protected content?

But before content owners hold a party, this reduction was very fleeting, and within a day those who used Megaupload simply shifted to other solutions, such as Putlocker, NovaMov and MediaFire. In fact, the consequences were actually worse than intended, because where prior to the shutdown most of the traffic for US downloaders was focused inside those geographic boundaries, afterwards they started to access European sources, sending terabytes of data across expensive transatlantic connections. Because the transfers aren’t localised, this is a much less efficient system and is costing the American ISPs plenty – expenses they’ll pass on to their customers in due course.

There have been some quantifiable negative impacts, mostly in those wishing to invest in business offering cloud computing models. It’s worth nothing that it wasn’t Megaupload itself that filled its storage with copyrighted content, but its customers who uploaded it. If, therefore, a company can be held accountable for whatever its storage users put on those drives, then it probably means that cloud-based storage isn’t a commercially viable solution for anyone, even if it’s a technically possible option.

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