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.
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?
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.
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.
