What had triumphantly been hailed as a landmark 2009 copyright law case of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) against illegal file sharing in Sweden appears to have not significantly deterred online file sharing. In fact, just the opposite has occurred.
An Overview
The Pirate Bay (TPB) site was launched in 2003 as a commercial enterprise offering free access to most media content (including copyrighted material) using BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-hosting protocol (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent(Protocol)) services. The offering includes movies, TV shows, e-books, live sport games, software, and more. TPB had been ranked as the 86th most popular website in the world and 17th in Sweden (January 2011). In May 2006, Swedish police raided the website’s servers in Stockholm, confiscating their equipment but kept the website down for only 3 days. In March 2011, TPB boasted that it had more than 3 million unique peers over 4.5 million registered users, even though registration is not required to be able to download BitTorrent files. The site generates revenue by advertisements, donations, and sales of merchandise.
The Legal Situation
Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as a defendant and a plaintiff. The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden charged four individuals with promoting copyright infringement by facilitating other people’s breach of copyright law by using TPB’s BitTorrent technology. For 34 cases of copyright infringement, the damage claims could exceed US$12 million. The trial started on February 16, 2009, and ended on March 3, 2009, with a guilty verdict, which carried a one-year prison sentence and a fine of US$3.5 million. The four founders lost on appeal in 2010 and succeeded in getting reduced prison time, but the copyright infringement fine was increased, likely a result of TPB’s continued operation and facilitation of copyright infringement. The site is now blocked by several countries. The U.S. government considers TPB (together with Chinese sites Baidu and Taobao) as top markets for pirated and counterfeit goods.
Current Operation
As of March 2011, TPB continues to offer BitTorrent file sharing. In fact, much public support was noted. The Piratbyrån (“The Pirate Bureau”), a Swedish organization, was established by TPB followers to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property. In addition to protests against the intellectual property bill as a whole, the Pirate Party has created and called for noncommercial file sharing to be legalized in the United Kingdom. Formed in 2009, the party entered candidates in the 2010 UK general election and won a seat in Parliament. The Pirate Party advocates copyright and patent law reform and a reduction in government surveillance. TPB’s founders have worked on several other decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing websites, which have flourished in filling the enormous global demand for file sharing.
All along, file-sharing technology has been one step ahead of enforcement. For example, in December 2007, TPB moved from a custom Linux-based server, called Hypercube, to Opentracker so that its BitTorrent tracking software could enable the use of UDP tracker protocol. In June 2008, TPB adapted its servers to support SSL encryption in response to Sweden’s new wiretapping law. In January 2009, TPB launched IPv6 support for its tracker system.
Even after losing its November 2010 appeal, TPB kept growing. In 2011, TPB’s founders launched a new website, called IPREDator, offering IP address anonymity to registered users by tunneling traffic into a secu server, which reassigns fake IP addresses to registered users so that they may access TPB or other BitTorrent tracking sites on the Web for file sharing without revealing their true IP addresses. Although TPB continues to thrive today, as one of the most popular websites on the Internet, many countries are enacting new tougher copyright protection laws aimed directly at stopping this illegal activity. Note that Facebook blocks all shared links to TPB in both public and private messages
Discussion
Pirate Bay is one of a hundred websites that specialize in pirated and counterfeit content. Pirate Bay does not host content in contrast to sites like justin.tv that allows people to upload videos, included pirated ones. Pirate Bay only links to illegal material. Only torrent files are saved at the server. This means that no copyrighted and/or illegal materials are stored by the company. It is therefore, according to TPB, not possible to hold the people behind Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. The Swedish Supreme Court will decide the issue.
The Pirate Bay case is only one part of a much broader issue of protecting intellectual property on the Internet. An interesting related issue is the hosting of content by sites such as YouTube and Justin.tv, which is more complicated (e.g., see Stone 2011). Note that one aspect in this case is that the U.S. government is pushing the Swedish government to take a tougher stand against pirating.
Q: Explore the international legal aspects of this case. Can one country persuade another country to introduce tougher laws?