Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
StreamCast translated that demand into dollars....Theunlawful objective is unmis-
takable” [97].
According to the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals erred when
it cited
Sony v. Universal City Studios.
The more relevant precedent was
Gershwin Pub-
lishing Corporation v. Columbia Artists Management, Inc.
The Supreme Court remanded
the case to the Court of Appeals, suggesting that a summary judgment in favor of MGM
would be in order. Grokster shut down its peer-to-peer network in November 2005 and
paid $50 million to “movie studios, record labels and music publishers” [98].
The Pirate Bay, based in Stockholm, Sweden, is one of the biggest file-sharing Web sites
in the world, with an estimated 25 million users [99]. People use the Pirate Bay to search
for songs, movies, TV shows, or computer programs they can download for free. These
items of intellectual property are broken into BitTorrent fragments stored in thousands
of different computers scattered across the globe. Established in 2003, the Pirate Bay has
been called “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright—or
pro-piracy—movement” [100].
The movie industry pressured the Swedish government to do something about the
Pirate Bay, and in 2006 Swedish police raided its offices and confiscated 186 servers, but
the site was offline for only three days [100, 101]. After the site was reactivated, the num-
ber of people accessing it increased significantly, perhaps because of the international
publicity the Pirate Bay received as a result of the raid [100].
In 2008 the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry sued four indi-
viduals connected with the Pirate Bay for making available 33 copyrighted works: twenty
songs, nine films, and four computer games [99]. The defendants argued that the Pirate
Bay is simply a search engine and does not host any copyrighted content [102]. In April
2009, a District Court in Stockholm found Carl Lundstrom, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde,
and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg guilty of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. All
four were sentenced to one year in prison, and altogether were fined 30 million Swedish
kronor (about $3.6 million). In November 2010, an appeals court in Sweden upheld the
convictions but shortened the sentences and increased the fine to 46 million kronor ($6.5
million) [103].
Meanwhile, the Pirate Bay Web site is still operational and enormously popular.
Originally it had the domain name thepiratebay.org. Fearing that their .org domain
would be seized by American officials, the site moved to the Swedish domain .se in 2012.
When Sweden sought the seizure of the domain name thepiratebay.se in 2013, the Pirate
Bay moved to thepiratebay.sx, registered in the tiny Caribbean country of Sint Maarten
[104].
In many countries the Pirate Bay's official URL is blocked by Internet service
providers. People in these countries are still able to access the Pirate Bay by connect-
ing to one of more than 150 proxy sites hosted in countries that do not block access to
the Pirate Bay.
