Unit One Case Analysis
Read the APPLICATION CASE on Pages 50 to 54 called, "The Pirate Bay: The World's Most Resilient
Copyright Infringer?"
Write a 5 page paper (1500 or more words) in APA format in response to the following questions:
a. Do you think The Pirate Bay can continue to survive in a global Internet world?
Why or why not?
b. Why is legislation like The Protect IP Act opposed by Google and civil liberties
groups?
c. Do you think it is possible to reliably identify "dedicated infringing Web sites?"
What criteria do you suggest?
d. Why does cloud computing threaten pirate sites?
Below is a recommended outline.
2. Cover Page ( Please see APA Sample paper)
3. Introduction
a. A thesis statement
b. Purpose of paper
c. Overview of paper
4. Body (Cite sources within-text citations.)
5. Conclusion - Summary of main points
a. Lessons Learned and Recommendations
6. References - List the references you cited in the text of your paper according to APA format.
The Pirate Bay (TPB), a Swedish Web site (Piratebay.org), is one of the world's most popular pirated music and content sites, offering free access to millions of copyrighted songs and thousands of copyrighted Hollywood movies. In June 2011, The Pirate Bay reported that it had about 5 million registered users, and 25 million non-registered users (so-called "free riders").
To put that number in perspective, consider that it is nearly three times the population of Sweden itself (9 million). The Pirate Bay is regularly in the top 100 most popular Web sites in the world, and reaches 1% of the global Internet popula- tion, according to Internet analysts in 2011. In Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, it often ranks as one of the top 10 sites. This despite the fact that TPB has been subjected to repeated legal efforts to shut it down.
It bills itself as "the world's most resilient bittorrent site." But the battle is far from over. The Internet is becoming a tough place for music and video pirates to make a living in part because of enforce- ment actions, but more importantly because of new mobile and wireless technologies that enable high-quality content to be streamed for just a small fee.
First some background. The Pirate Bay is part of a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, "the Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that's something we want to preserve." In a unique twist on prior efforts to provide "free" music, The Pirate Bay does not operate a database of copyrighted content. Neither does it operate a network of computers owned by "members" who store the content, nor create, own, or distribute software (like BitTorrent and most other so-called P2P networks) that permit such networks to exist in the first place. These were the old techniques for ripping off music. Instead, The Pirate Bay simply provides a search engine that responds to user queries for music tracks, or specific movie titles, and generates a list of search results that include P2P networks around the world where the titles can be found. By click- ing on a selected link, users gain access to the copyrighted content, but only after downloading software and other files from that P2P network.
Voila! "No body, no crime." The Pirate Bay just links its users to stolen media files. What could be illegal? The Pirate Bay claims it is merely a search engine provid- ing pointers to existing P2P networks that it does not itself control. It claims that it cannot control what content users ultimately find on those P2P networks, and that it is no different from any other search engine, such as Google or Bing, which are not held responsible for the content found on sites listed in search results. From a broader standpoint, The Pirate Bay's founders also claim that copyright laws in gen- eral unjustly interfere with the free flow of information on the Internet, and that in any event, they were not violating Swedish copyright law, which they felt should be the only law that applied. And they further claimed they did not encourage, incite, or enable illegal downloading. Nevertheless, the defendants have never denied theirs was a commercial enterprise. Despite all the talk by the Pirate Party calling for the free, unfettered spread of culture, The Pirate Bay was a money-making operation from the beginning, designed to produce profits for its founders, with advertising as the primary source of revenue.
However, in a ruling that puts to rest the notion that the law is always behind the development of technology, the First Swedish Court in Stockholm declared the four founders guilty of violating Swedish copyright law, and sentenced each to one year in prison and payment of $3.5 million in restitution to the plaintiffs, all Swedish divisions of the major record label firms (Warner Music, Sony, and EMI Group among them). The court said "By providing a website with ... well-developed search func- tions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the web- site, the accused have incited the crimes that the file sharers have committed." The court also said that the four defendants had been aware of the fact that copyrighted material was shared with the help of their site. The prison sentence was justified by "extensive accessibility of others' copyrights and the fact that the operation was con- ducted commercially and in an organized fashion." In other words, the court believed the defendants were engaged in a commercial enterprise, the basis of which was encouraging visitors to violate the copyrights of owners. In fact, the primary purpose of The Pirate Bay was to violate copyrights in order to make money for the owners (commercial intent).
"Enable," "induce," and "encourage" copyright infringement and "intent to sell" are key words in this ruling and The Pirate Bay case. These concepts grounded in Western law are not "disabled" by new technology, but instead can be, and are, extensible to new technologies, and used to shape technology to society's needs and wishes. Indeed, there's a consensus developing among prosecutors and courts world- wide that infringement is not justified simply because it's technically possible to do it on the Internet. The Pirate Bay is appealing the court judgment, has paid no fine, and its owners have, as yet, never spent a night in jail. The Pirate Bay Web site continues to operate in Sweden much as before. Well, almost. In 2011, the firm moved its servers into caves in Sweden, and dispersed multiple copies of its program to other countries just in case Swedish police try to confiscate its servers again.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government pressured the Swedish government to strengthen its copyright laws to discourage rampant downloading. In Sweden, downloading music and videos from illegal sites was very popular, engaged in by 43% of the Swedish Inter- net population. To strengthen its laws, Sweden adopted the European Union conven- tion on copyrights, which allows content owners to receive from Internet providers the names and addresses of people suspected of sharing pirated files. In France, participat- ing in these pirate sites will result in banishment from the Internet for up to three years. As a result, Internet traffic in Sweden declined by 40%, and has stayed there.
Like the fight against the original Caribbean pirates of the seventeenth century, global forces continue to marshal against The Pirate Bay. Not the British Navy this time, but a loose coalition of the United States and a number of European countries. The firm has been hounded by lawsuits, police raids, and confiscation of servers in France, Finland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, the U.K., and Greece. These countries have in some cases refused to allow Internet service providers in their countries to host The Pirate Bay, or link to The Pirate Bay, no matter where in the world its servers are located. The Pirate Bay has caused England, France, Malaysia, Finland, and most recently the United States, to consider strong intellectual prop- erty protection laws that will prevent domestic search engines and ISPs from linking to infringing sites, or resolving their domain names. Called the Protect IP Act, the proposed legislation now in the U.S. Senate is an effort to shut off traffic from the United States to offshore pirate sites that have no significant use other than engaging, enabling, or facilitating the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material in "substantially complete form." The target sites must be "dedicated to infringing." In addition, the law would permit intellectual property owners and government agencies to seek injunctions against infringing sites, potentially shutting them down immediately until the issues can be argued in court. For onshore sites, the Immigra- tion and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency already seizes Web site domains that violate U.S. laws on Internet gambling and intellectual property theft, and redirects this traffic to a Web page hosted by ICE explaining the action. The Protect IP Act and similar legislation in Europe
is opposed by civil liberties groups and search engine firms such as Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes defining "dedicated infringing sites" could be somewhat arbitrary, and the legislation introduces the possibility that government agencies could censor or
shut down Web sites, threatening freedom of speech. Eric Schmidt, now Chairman of Google, said in May 2011 that Google will fight all proposed restrictions on search engine linking because they could "set a disastrous precedent" for freedom of speech, and lead to censorship similar to that imposed by China. Because Google's search engine is used by millions of people every day to find BitTorrent sites, Google itself is a major contributor to infringement, albeit unintentionally. Meanwhile, the world's largest advertising agency, GroupM, has keelhauled The Pirate Bay and 2,000 other sites worldwide by putting the sites on its blacklist of copyright infringing sites where it will not buy advertising space. Pirating intellectual property is, above all, about the money, as any good pirate knows.
replacing Walmart. By 2011, the iTunes Store had sold over 15 billion songs, 450 million TV shows, and over 100 million movies, making it the world's most popular online music, TV, and movie store. Its revenues are up 75% in the last year. Driving this performance, of course, are the sales of its various i-devices. By mid-2011, Apple had sold over 300 million iPods (all models), over 125 million iPhones, and 25 million iPads. And according to a study by Arbor Networks and the University of Michigan, peer-to-peer traffic is shrinking dramatically, and streaming of video and music from legitimate sites has grown to over 10% of all Internet traffic. Researchers surmise that consumers have just found it a lot easier and more convenient to access videos and music from these sites rather than using P2P sharing sites where a movie can take eight hours to download, and where downloading music tracks can also bring a host of malware with the music.
In addition, the whole idea of "owning" music in the form of records, tapes, CDs, and music files stored on your hard drive is out of date. While subscription models in the past did not work, they were limited to streaming music to desktop and laptop PCs. In the world of mobile Internet devices, the idea of streaming music all day long to your iPhone or BlackBerry is much more attractive. In 2011, Pandora, the music- streaming service, has over 94 million registered users and 34 million subscribers, 30% of whom connect with smartphones. The U.K. music service Spotify opened to U.S. customers in July 2011, and offers its 10 million subscribers access to more than 13 million streaming music tracks that can be played instantly by just dragging the song you want to your iPhone app. Users do not need to wait for downloads or clutter their hard drives and flash drives with files, or organize the thousands of songs on their storage devices. However, a download service was added in 2011.
Do you think The Pirate Bay can continue to survive in a global Internet world? Why or why not? 2. Why is legislation like The Protect IP Act opposed by Google and civil liberties groups? 3. Do you think it is possible to reliably identify "dedicated infringing Web sites?" What criteria do you suggest? 4. Why does cloud computing threaten pirate sites?