Pirates of the CaraSweden!

With the recent news of piracy along the important sea routes that border Africa, it it only fitting that another type of piracy reclaims its place at the head of Arrggghhhh table!  Old school pirates made their living off of hijacking and pillaging vessels along the water.  The Pirate Bay however takes swashbuckling to a more modern type of criminal activity, namely illegal file sharing.  

The four defendants in the case against Pirate Bay face jail time if found guilty tomorrow in Stockholm, Sweden.  While their prison sentences may be tame (up to a year), this could be a landmark case in the broader fight against illegal file sharing.  The entertainment industry has been waging this war for quite sometime now with limited success.  While victories against entities like Napster seemed like a step in the right direction, like weeds, file sharing sites keep sprouting up again.

From someone who knows the ins-and-outs of music downloading, I can honestly say that the effects of this ruling will be minimal.  While P2P sharing software, LimeWire comes to mind, is a powerful tool, it is too easy to shut them down.  The music downloaded from P2P services can be completely shut off just by closing the service.  But torrent services like Pirate Bay are a completely different animal.  The torrent sites are spread out all over the internet, and it would be an extremely difficult challenge to irradicate the Web of all of these torrents.

No actual material is stored on the Web site that features a search function for file sharing with BitTorrent technology-which is legal in itself, but commonly used for illegal file sharing.

If the verdict, however, comes in not guilty the entertainment industry could be set back for quite some time.  Perhaps, they might recognize the futility of this endeavor.  I think South Park addressed it best.  Let's hope that some kind of compromise can be reached.  This whole thing's a mess, and in the end, everyone is losing.  This is the original article.