The Pirate Bay is, for those not “in the know,” one of several popular websites wherein a popular activity is supported and encouraged. That popular activity is what the content cartel calls “piracy.” Just about everyone else calls it “not a big deal” (and I tend to agree). The good news is the legal systems around the world are starting to realize that it’s also “not a big deal” too — recently access to the The Pirate Bay website was blocked for Italian users (by an Italian judge), and the website responded with an appeal.

The Pirate Bay won. Heh!

I’m not among the teeming masses who claim “piracy is a victimless crime!” or that “nobody pirates, these lawyers are just trying to protect a dying business model and blaming everyone who uses [insert popular peer-to-peer utility here]!”

Of course, the record labels, movie studios, game makers, and book publishers of today are using lawyers to help shore up the crumbling business that rakes in billions a year, because other methods of distributing information are becoming more and more widespread and rendering the “old” methods obsolete. Piracy isn’t a victimless “crime” — in the strictest legal sense, it’s simply a violation of copyright and nothing more. People didn’t used to get sued for simply downloading a game or a music CD, because suing over something so small is a fucking stupid idea. In recent years (thanks in no small part to Metallica¹ … assholes) the RIAA and MPAA (along with others) have been drinking lots of the stupid juice.

Meanwhile, the RIAA keeps losing every case it files in court.

The reason piracy hasn’t destroyed the modern digital economy is that it really doesn’t cost that much to the industries that are wailing and moaning about it. It is a non-zero impact on the content producer’s bottom line to have a small portion of its potential market pirate their releases instead of buying it, but it’s not enough to kill profits or ruin the business.

Lots of different “theories” have been tested in court, with little success, to punish “small-time” pirates. The RIAA and MPAA are desperate for even a single, precedent-setting win in a courtroom so they can genuinely start spewing advertisements and warnings to the public: “see? We can nail you!” But so far, every attempt has been decimated in court (even if it takes an appeal to get there).

“Making Available” Doesn’t Equal “Distribution”

One of the lynchpins of the content cartel’s argument against piracy in recent years is that the simple act of making an unlawful copy available for download is a crime. Why try to argue from that obscure point of view? Most peer-to-peer file sharing clients automatically share (with the cloud) whatever they’ve downloaded, so that item becomes mirrored in more and more places (becoming more accessible to more people, at faster data rates because there are more systems with copies of the content). This, in turn, gives the RIAA a bit of traction when they claim “even opening up a file sharing program can make you a criminal!” Fortunately, the courts have routinely rejected this.

No Harm, No Foul

The biggest problem with these lawsuits is that they demand exorbitant damages, far beyond even any theoretical damage that could be considered reasonable. Take the recent case over a $222,000 fine. Two hundred twenty two thousand dollars for pirating one fucking CD? The punishments these guys are chasing just aren’t proportionate to the so-called “crime” — the penalty for walking into a fucking store and stealing a physical CD is much lower than this, and that act robs the seller of their ability to sell that object.

This is one of the reasons these suits generally fail. Judges don’t like this shit.

Picking On the Weak

Another reason these suits are falling flat on their collective asses is the way the suits are being filed. The RIAA set up a “settlement center” — a literal factory that churns out legal threats demanding $3,000 to avoid being sued — and threatened thousands of lower- and middle-class families with financial ruin if they didn’t comply.

They’ve never sued a wealthy person. They’ve never sued a lawyer. They’ve never sued a politician.

See a pattern? They’ve never directly pissed off someone wealthy or powerful enough to stomp their entire effort in one fell swoop. A wealthy person could just hire a “dream team” of lawyers to trounce the initial suit and launch a fatal countersuit. A lawyer could shred the original argument himself and finally win a precedent-setting countersuit as well. A politician could get pissed enough to finally spearhead a bipartisan effort to put a stop to this bullshit once it became clear these assholes will sue anybody.

Except, they won’t. As long as they’re just harassing the teeming masses and not the folks in charge, it’s okay by them.

Illegal Snooping

It’s worth mentioning that they’re also using questionable (and potentially illegal) tricks to trap people — MediaSentry is rumored not to be licensed for the kinds of investigating it’s doing in several states. That’s a big no-no, and a pretty much automated win for anybody sued in those states when the suit uses MediaSentry’s work as evidence.

It goes beyond this, though — the cartel has tried to use the courts to force ISPs to reveal the identities of suspected “pirates.” It’s pressured foreign governments and commercial interests to start their own witch hunts. It’s set up “honeypot” traps of its own to trick users into downloading in a way that “proves” they’re guilty. It’s tried poisoning peer-to-peer networks with bogus clients spewing out bogus data.

Is this good behavior? Is this how a “responsible corporate citizen” should behave on the world stage?

You can argue that piracy is “wrong,” either morally, ethically, or legally. But one thing you can’t argue — it’s here to stay, no matter what the imbeciles at the RIAA do.

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