Even now, the fall-out from the Pirate Bay trial continues to dominate headlines across music and technology websites and blogs.
There have been a number of twists and turns, most recently that the judge in The Pirate Bay trial has been accused of bias. Sweden's national radio station revealed that Thomas Norström was a member of the same pro-copyright groups as several of the main entertainment industry reps in the case. Four days after the trial, The Pirate Bay lodged their appeal and claimed in a
blog post, "We are more determined than ever that what we do is right. Millions of users are a good proof of that."
Two other related stories also came to light, namely a new research report from the Norwegian School of Management, which suggested that P2P users are likely to buy ten times more music than someone who doesn’t file-share. The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. On the other side of the coin, various reports suggest that torrent sites across Europe are closing in the wake of the news, while some suggest that they are merely going more underground and are harder to track.
Regardless of the fall-out, we were particularly interested in watching how the press (including technology sites and blogs) dealt with the news that the founders would be sentenced to a year in jail and fined by way of compensation to rightsholders.
The Times, Telegraph and Music Week handled the news of the verdict in a similar fashion. Rather shockingly, the first paragraph on Music Week’s back-slapping front page this week read: “The music industry has sunk the aspirations of future pirates after claiming its biggest scalp to date.” Marcus Oscarsson and David Charter in the
Times on Friday went with the line, “In a big victory for the entertainment industries..,” while the
Telegraph opted for a less bombastic, but equally strange, “Four Swedish men were jailed for a year and fined nearly £2.5 million on Friday after they lost a landmark internet piracy court case against some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry.” “Sunk the aspirations?” “Big victory?” “Landmark case?” We beg to disagree. Each time the entertainment industries have sued file-sharing services (Napster, Kazaa, Grokster), we’ve been told the outcome is ‘landmark’, so why then does the desire for litigation keep on raising its ugly head?
Rather ironically, the Telegraph and Times, in separate comment pieces, took an entirely different line altogether. “There seems little chance that the verdict will change anything in the long war between copyright owners and internet users.” (
Times - Tom Whitwell). “The fact remains, though, that The Pirate Bay is simply the latest in a long line of filesharing websites against whom legal action has been taken, and yet the levels of online piracy shows no signs of abating.” (
Telegraph – Claudine Beaumont)
As we might have predicted, both the Guardian and Independent approached the story sensibly, with the Guardian’s Emily Bell probably making the
most sense out of all writers on the national papers. “The Pirate Bay flouted the law, daring the authorities to do something about it and so the outcome was not much short of inevitable, albeit disproportionate and ineffectual. But The Pirate Bay is not the beginning of the end for copyright infringement. That ship has already sailed, carrying more than just pirates.” Pat Pilcher in Monday’s
Independent highlighted the real ongoing problem with file-sharing and the fact that the Pirate Bay trial will do little to stop the problem. “Future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bitorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler. Where the current crop of Bit Torrent file-sharing applications need to be pointed at torrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay to find files, Tribler's searches are done over the networks of fellow Bit Torrent users, sidestepping centralised torrent tracking sites altogether.”
Of course, the story on the tech blogs was far more anti-music industry.
One blogger ran the headline: “Why the Pirate Bay trial is bullsh*t”. Even the Christian Science Monitor had something to say about the whole affair (hardly surprising given where its funding might come from – namely Hollywood!), “The Pirate Bay case: Not necessarily a victory for Hollywood,” said its headline. The NME dealt with the story by giving Paul McCartney a platform to express his views, where he stated that the ruling was ‘fair’. We’re not entirely sure why it defaulted to Paul McCartney – he’s hardly the spokesperson for today’s NME generation, but maybe that was the point!
The Register’s Andrew Orlowski shed an interesting light on the events: “Any recording business executive celebrating the court victory over The Pirate Bay should have been in San Francisco this weekend for a reality check. Attending CodeCon 2009 would have brought them swiftly down to earth, and emphasised the futility of trying to prevent P2P file sharing. What's the point, when you can make money off it instead?” Even the
Wall St Journal approached it all with caution: “The operators of a notorious file-sharing Web site were found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court, a key legal victory for the entertainment industry that nonetheless may do little to stem the piracy of entertainment on the Internet.” (Sarah McBride)
What can we learn from this? We’d sound a note of caution to some publications: look beyond the press statements from the IFPI and certain other trade bodies. This was not an out-and-out triumph, it was yet another costly case, while the effects of the ruling simply can’t be measured. It hardly brought P2P networks crashing down. The word that copyright infringement is illegal might be stronger as a result, but is that really going to stop them? Probably not. Certain publications might be wise to take a more balanced view in future.
Nicola Slade
