Tech Talk: Chasing pirates with cannons and lawyers
David Mosher
Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Features
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A few years ago it seemed nearly unfathomable that the Pirate Bay could be taken down. First, it was based in Sweden. Sweden's Internet users are some of the Internet's most notorious pirates, with a vast majority of the population admitting to downloading content such as music and movies illegally. Second, the site isn't run by a company or by any real head masterminds. It's a collection of efforts given to promoting free content, making it very difficult to point the finger at any one person. But that's finally what has happened.
The pirates have been thrown in jail and have been fined a whopping $3.6 million for compensation in damages done by operating the Pirate Bay. The servers were raided and shut down. And yet, nothing has changed.
The Pirate Bay is still online and in operation, and therewith lies the problem. Governments can jail and fine, and yet the pirating still continues. Even if the Pirate Bay does finally get shut down, there are bound to be others to take its place. It's doubtful that it ever will, though, with its servers now spread around in an anonymous international community, making it particularly more difficult to raid.
Interestingly enough, it's doubtful that any government will go on to tackle the largest proprietor of free torrent links and illegal content links: Google.
Google and the Pirate Bay are more similar than they appear at first glance. Both provide a search function, which can be used to find torrents. These torrents may be illegal in nature, providing downloads to such things as movies that have not been released yet. But unless Google starts calling itself the Buccaneer Google Haven, it's unlikely that the industry will go after them.
Google is simply too large with too much money and too many lawyers. And Google also has a rather important note in its favor; it provides searches to a plethora of different categories, while the Pirate Bay, so obviously named, does not. But the fact remains that Google, not the Pirate Bay or anyone else, provides the most users with links to illegal content. But providing links isn't illegal. Kind of.
In an attempt to placate the industry, Google says it attempts to remove any known illegal links. But removing links from a beast such as Google is no easy feat. And even if it removes links to illegal content, it can still legally provide links to Web sites (such as the Pirate Bay) that may contain illegal content within their Web site. Google cannot be responsible for the entire content of each and every Web site it links to.
So that leaves us with the present. The industry can run around jailing and shutting down torrent sites. Internet users will always be creating new ones, which garner the attention of migrating users. Google links to it in a torrent search, and the process repeats itself. It seems like someone, somewhere, is going about this the wrong way. Maybe that someone is charging $1.29 per song.
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