p2pnet news view | Freedom:- Linking is what the Net is all about.

Showing people where to go, and how to get there. Allowing freedom of speech and expression to prosper.

Without it, the the World Wibe Web would be nothing more than a few feeble strands, Google would be a mere gurgle and Yahoo wouldn’t be anything to shout about.

But according to the music and movie industries, hyperlinking is the online crime of the digital 21st century.

Sweden’s The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the entertainment cartels for years. Like other sites of its nature, most of which have succumbed to relentless ‘legal’ assault and battery, it’s been interfering with cartel plans to dominate the digital universe. But TPB has not only been hanging in, it’s been going from strength to strength, collecting admirers and supporters in the hundreds of millions.

That’s why, with compliant Swedish and US governments backing them, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 organised music gang, and Hollywood, in the shape of Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, have spent unaccountable millions of dollars trying to nail it having, they figure, already handily disposed of Russia’s AllofMP3.com.

Yesterday, Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall spearheaded the corporate move to have Fredrik Neij (’TiAMO’), Gottfrid Svartholm (’Anakata’), Peter Sunde (’Brokep’) and businessman Carl Lundström charged with assisting copyright infringement.

Given that TPB’s servers are stashed here there and everywhere, it’s hard to see what this official effort to crush the site will achieve and,”In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site,” says Sunde.

“The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We’ve been here for years and we will be here many more.”

Linking to links which link …..

p2pnet, too, is being sued for linking, this time by Canadian businessman Wayne Crookes.

But it’s not alone. Crookes is also going after Google, Wikimedia, Pbwiki, Yahoo, MySpace, Openpolitics.ca, Domains by Proxy, Michael Pilling, Hayley Easton, Kate Holloway, Craig Hubley, Frank Cameron, Catharine Johannson, Gareth White, Michael Geist, and a number anonymous individuals.

“Crookes, whose case against Warren De Simone was recently dismissed, claims linking to links which link to items which displease him amounts to defamation,” I posted in June, 2006, going on:

“Now Google is being sued by a London businessman in an(other) landmark legal action, ‘that could hold the US-based company liable for the publication of inaccurate, malicious or damaging material on the internet,’ says The Independent.”

My case hasn’t set it for trial, but I’ll shortly bringing a motion for dismissal on the vital question of whether or not merely hyperlinking to something equals liability.

Fortunately, Crookes suing the Net involves not only a handful of very ordinary, very broke, people, but also a number of powerful and wealthy organisations who can afford the very best in legal representation. This means the case will be properly heard and dealt with, unlike most lawsuits which involve Big Music and Hollywood.

Thanks for the PR

The purely commercial entertainment cartels answer only to their shareholders. But the administrations around the world clock who kowtow shamelessly and blatantly to the cartels ultimately answer to the people who elected them.

An attempt by the Canadian government to impose DMCA-like copyright legislation was blocked at the last moment by an online protest. Whether the success will be carried forward resulting in an abandonment of the Canadian government’s efforts to please America rather than its own citizens remains to be seen.

However, it doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going to happen when, not if, hundreds of millions of surfers around the world decide they’ve had enough and start using the Net to make themselves heard and felt online and off.

Not too long ago, The Pirate Bay was little more than an oddity which was largely unknown to the world at large.

Now, thanks to the efforts of the entertainment cartels, it’s a byword in millions of households around the world which would otherwise never have heard of it. And the people who run TPB are being cast as heroes.

In much the same way Big Music efforts to crush P2P music file sharing did little more than publicise it, attempts to terrorised TPB into submission have done the same.

The world is moving on

In the extremely unlikely event that it’s somehow taken down, so what? Hundreds of other similar sites will immediately spring up to take its place and instead of the devil they know, and hate, the corporate music labels and movie studios will be trying to deal with scores of other shiny new sites run by eager young innovators who have nothing but contempt for the corporate copyright community.

“In a similar vein,” says the Globe & Mail, “a music search engine called Seeqpod is being sued by the record label EMI because it makes it easy for people to find public mp3 files on the Web (there are half a dozen other services that do the same thing, including Songza and g2p.org). Should that be illegal? G2P.org actually just does a search through Google to find files. If that’s illegal, does that make Google responsible for linking to those files?

“Even if The Pirate Bay is successfully sued, it isn’t likely to affect downloading much. The site may have the largest torrent ‘tracker’ in the world, but it isn’t the only one – there are thousands of them. Even if The Pirate Bay is found guilty and goes out of business, the servers that run the site aren’t actually located in Sweden and will likely continue functioning (The Pirate Bay claims to not even know where the servers are). The founders of the service say their tracker will remain operating even if they are found guilty.”

While the Big Music and Hollywood dinosaurs rant and rave, the world is moving on.They could, even at this late date, retrieve the situation by simply going back to square one to start working with people, including their own customers, instead of against them.

But the chances of that happening aren’t high.

“News of the case was welcomed by representatives of the entertainment industry, who said that there was evidence the site made £1.5m per year,” says Guardian Unlimited, quoting John Kennedy, the man who runs the Big 4’s IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry).

“We welcome the filing of these charges,” he goes on. “The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden – normally the most law abiding of EU countries – look like a piracy haven.”

It would have been more accurate for Kennedy to have thanked Swedish government for all the help it’s given the cartels in their pursuit of this, relatively speaking, tiny online operation.

Because the entertainment industry has been behind Sweden’s attacks on The Pirate Bay from day one so the news should indeed be welcomed to Kennedy and the other cartel figureheads for wholly responsible for it.

Sweden’s attack on The Pirate Bay represents hundreds of millions of corporate lobbying (and other) dollars well spent.

Good luck, Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and Lundström.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 6:13 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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