Fair use, The Pirate Bay and guts
I don’t have a lot to say on the topic of Fair Use. I am for being able to use the media you purchase in an unencumbered way.
I also think sites like The Pirate Bay are doing things to enable people to procure copyrighted material they didn’t pay for.
But what I will stand firm on is that I am a puss. If authorities came to me and said I could end up doing 2 years in the pen for putting up text files that will track digital media and allow the end user to download it…I would stop, forthwith. There isn’t a chance in the world I would fight that battle.
I would go to prison to protect human rights violations. I would go to prison to stop torture. I would not go to prison so people can have unfettered access to reruns of The Cosby Show.
Those dudes at The Pirate Bay, right or wrong, have guts.
I’m not sure the motives of TPB owners are completely noble. I checked the site out, and it appeared to have a lot of advertising. The prosecution claims they made about $4.5m U.S. in advertising money over the last year. No idea what their bandwidth/hosting costs are, but if they are just hosting torrents, I’d be surprised if their costs were anywhere near $1m. Being in Sweden, I think they are also way less likely to do the kind of time (if any) that someone would probably serve if facing the US judicial system.
No, I don’t think they are entirely noble. I am sure they have made a ton of cash… I still wouldn’t do it :)
The irony here is that if the RIAA and MPAA had invented TPB, they’d be making all that money instead - maybe even more because major advertisers wouldn’t have an aversion to buying ad space on a legitimate site. Of course, RIAA/MPAA is currently making much more than that, but, hey, MTV created VH-1 because they knew someone would do it eventually, and it did quite well.