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23/04/2009 - 17:01 A Stockholm court last week convicted four men managing the Pirate Bay file-sharing site of helping others commit copyright violations and gave them one-year prison sentences. They also were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures. Anyway, the Pirate Bay, which has claimed to have more than 3.5 million registered users, does not host the shared files itself, but helped users download using BitTorrent software. Tomas Norström, the judge in the Pirate Bay case, is accused of being bias by the defence lawyer as he is on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property) and is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, according to a report on Sveriges Radio's P3 news program. File sharing is the exchange of files over computer networks. The legal issues surrounding file sharing have been the subject of debate and conferences, especially among lawyers in the entertainment industries. In the early 1980s, the film companies in the USA fought to suppress the device in the consumer market, citing concerns about copyright violations. In the case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the device was allowable for private use, thereby guaranteeing market acceptance. In the years following, the film companies found that videorecordings of their products had become a major income source. However, television networks found the widespread use of this device was threatening their advertising business model because viewers then have the ability to either fast forward through television commercials, or pause recording when they are broadcast (source: Wikipedia). "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone", said Jack Valenti (former MPAA president). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, DVD gradually overtook VHS as the most popular format for playback of prerecorded video. Dear RIAA and MPAA, tomorrow, Internet will overtake DVDs. I'm pretty sure about that. Go back |
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