I’m always a bit worried when a respected news magazine tries to report about topics like Piracy for instance. Most of the time the articles are a bunch of assumptions taken from official biased sources like the RIAA to come to the conclusion how badly piracy affects businesses. Now it is Forbes trying to tell us why web pirates can’t be touched and it begins – who would have thought about that – with The Pirate Bay. They come to the conclusion that The Pirate Bay is shielded by Sweden’s lax copyright laws and international immunity. I personally think that it is a matter of perspective. The laws might be lax from the standpoint of an American company but tight for a Swedish one.
It is not illegal in Sweden to link to a torrent file and I never quite understood why linking to something would be the same as actually downloading it. This would in essence mean that selling weapons should be equivalent to killing someone with weapons. Another prime example is the paragraph about allofmp3, the Russian mp3 provider operating perfectly legal in Russia. Forbes sees it this way:
Not every scheme to evade intellectual property laws is so subtle. The music-selling site AllofMP3 uses a simpler business model: Base your company in Russia, steal music from American labels and sell it cheaply.
Again, the service is perfectly legal in Russia. This is actually globalization, something that all companies are so keen of. Only that this time the consumer is profiting from it and not the global companies who sell their goods worldwide, buy cheap labor in poor countries and give a **** about the country that they are based in.
I also find it quite fascinating that Forbes is directly linking to websites of copyright offenders. Isn’t it illegal to do so according to their logic ? (Linking to torrents is illegal but linking to websites that host torrents is not ?)
What’s your take ?
Related posts:
Danish Provider Tele2 forced to block allofmp3And so the Pirates win the day
Pirate Coelho – a story about pirates and success
Riaa is sueing Allofmp3
Ripping purchased music not fair use ?
DivX plots course to block pirates
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Fox says that linking to sites that host illegal tv shows is illegal
The RIAA exists because business practices have not kept up with technologies or attitudes. The RIAA exists because of a lack of vision and the lack of brains or balls to drive a sustainable business model. Rupert Murdoch may be the Anti-Christ but his brains are bigger than his balls but the two he has are gigantic brass ones.
You hit the nail on the head here. Pirate Bay is perfectly legal in Sweden. AllofMP3 is perfectly legal in Russia. Who are we to tell Swedish and Russian people how to design their copyright law?
They are sovereign independent countries, and they should be able to govern themselves as they please. All this whining about lax copyright laws and loopholes is just thinly veiled green underlined xenophobia.
green = greed :P