

Pirate Bay four sentenced to a year in prison - Flemlord
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/world/europe/18copy.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

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wmeredith
Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the ruling was “good
p.r.” for the music and movie industries:

“There’s a lot of value out of it, even though its value is not going to be a
meaningful reduction in file sharing,” he said. “They have to be seen to be
doing something, in the same way that customs fights drug trafficking — as a
deterrent.”

Because everyone knows how successful the war on drugs has been?

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biohacker42
Or the war on napster. That took care of piracy, yep sure did.

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bdfh42
Can we have a few more posts on this topic? We are falling way behind Reddit.

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snprbob86
I only see two posts about this on the front page. One is from torrentfreak,
with obvious bias. The other (this one) is NYTimes. Both say that they were
found guilty of violated copyright, sentenced to a year in prison and fined
millions.

While I agree that we probably only need one story about this, I don't think
two is really worth complaining about. This is truly a landmark case about a
topic which is definitely of critical interest to many hackers here.

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m_eiman
They were actually found guilty of "assisting in making copyright content
available".

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quoderat
WIth the amount of money they've spent on the ill-fated "war on piracy," they
could've invented Bittorrent, or at least ran their own for-pay tracker that
made the Pirate Bay operation look lame.

But no.

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chris11
The legal hassles with running a legal tracker would be horrendous. I think
every major contract would have to be renegotiated. How would you divide up
royalties for song downloads? And would torrent distribution even be covered
in current contract?

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radu_floricica
And yet, on youtube it seems to work. I don't know exactly how widespread it
is or what are the sums involved, but there are quite a few ad revenue sharing
schemes running.

Might be because youtube (and google) are already too big to sue.

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andreyf
And the title, of course, is dead false. They weren't convicted of violating
copyrights, but for "assisting in making copyright content available".

