What happened with The Pirate Bay was a travesty. The issue doesn't even go to the root of copyright law, it just shows that the USG is more than willing to throw its weight around for the benefit of the rich and powerful in Hollywood.
TPB was perfectly legal within the jurisdiction in which they operated. Rather than change the law, Sweden mounted a farcical prosecution after the US threatened sanctions if they didn't address the matter.
TPB hosted no media on its own; it was a torrent site, and linked to torrent files that contained the hashes of files and a link out to a tracker that matched people who possessed those hashes with others. If you want to make that illegal, that has far-reaching complications for all kind of online services. That's why instead of making it illegal, they just said "This is pissing off some rich people, so you're going to jail."
Most people support copyright in principle. It's the draconian extent to which modern copyright law has been stretched, again solely for the benefit of copyright holders and at the expense of the public that upsets people.
We don't have a DVD player that works with all our discs, some copy prevention systems screw it up. So i download the movies.
The torrent search site I used was closed, turns out Google works just as well (possibly better) with all the meta-data needed being hosted on Google servers (ie via "cache").
People have been extradited from UK to USA for giving the same information you can get from a Google search. It's mind blowing that we still want any of the companies that support that status quo to still exist.
We need places like TPB to pressure for and raise issues of over-reach in copyright because the governments are refusing to stand up to media conglomerates (arguably for selfish financial reasons).
TPB was perfectly legal within the jurisdiction in which they operated. Rather than change the law, Sweden mounted a farcical prosecution after the US threatened sanctions if they didn't address the matter.
TPB hosted no media on its own; it was a torrent site, and linked to torrent files that contained the hashes of files and a link out to a tracker that matched people who possessed those hashes with others. If you want to make that illegal, that has far-reaching complications for all kind of online services. That's why instead of making it illegal, they just said "This is pissing off some rich people, so you're going to jail."
Most people support copyright in principle. It's the draconian extent to which modern copyright law has been stretched, again solely for the benefit of copyright holders and at the expense of the public that upsets people.