Piracy, Ahoy

Pirates: 3,500,000 (Pirate Bay’s registered users) Courts: 4 (Pirate Bay’s hosts)

The Pirate Bay trial verdict is in, and it doesn’t look good for the pirates. If you haven't been following the Pirate Bay trial, allow me to provide you with some background via links:

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

For those “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) followers of this blog, here's a brief summary: Filesharing megasite hosts are tried, found guilty.

What surprises me with the Pirate Bay case is that only the site’s hosts were tried. I’m no tech-xpert, but I imagine there is a way to pursue and prosecute the users of Pirate Bay through the site’s logs or IP history. Now, the penalty the founders face (years in jail, millions of dollars in restitution, etc.) may be enough to discourage other would-be captains of pirate hosting sites; or, bilge rats may see the lack of prosecution of the users as clear waters for further piracy.

My interest is in the particulars. The founders were charged with, according to the first link, “assisting in making copyright content available” by archiving and storing BitTorrent files. It seems to me the real scallywags here are the unprosecuted users: they are the ones consuming and using the files; the founders were just the pirates who sorted the cove’s treasure, not the ones who thieved it. A mobster’s crooked accountant is as guilty as the mobster, I guess.

I’ve always imagined the underground piracy movement was too ethereal, too ubiquitous for any legal action to catch up with the chum buckets involved. Apparently not. While prosecuting four people may seem like a small victory, if doing so sinks the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, perhaps it is the same as bringing down the flagship of a giant armada. Maybe we ought to do the same with one of the renowned Somali pirate ports: take it down.