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Originally Posted by Paul Markham
Which makes an excellent case for banning the domain from the US.
But that would be the fault of the law makers, not the people who openly flout one countries law and take money from that country.
Maybe make a law that would make advertisers partly responsible for who they advertise with. They are just as guilty as TPB. Especially if they're US companies.
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I just told you, they can block the domain name if they took it to Court. They don't want to!
Do you know how screwed up the MPAA is? They convinced a federal judge to let them seize 500,000 blank DVDs that they claim were going to be used to make pirated DVDs. But there was never any hard evidence and they never even found a single pirated copy. And then they convinced the judge to let them destroy the DVDs. They took them to the middle of a park and crushed them with a bulldozer so that people could watch. If that isn't ignorant, I don't know what is. You have 500,000 blank DVDs. At the very least you could donate them to schools or hospitals. Or you could sell them and use the money to fund your anti-piracy campaigns.
Making advertisers liable for advertising on websites that (may) infringe on copyright would be obscene and unacceptable. Especially considering that many ads come from ad agencies, and that the content of websites can change in a matter of minutes, especially with user generated content. Imagine that you are running ads on NBC during Chuck or some other show, and you do not know what is going to be in that show before it aired, and the writers of Chuck stole some stuff from Gossip Girl. Do you think that the advertiser should be liable?
The internet is already way too uptight about what we can and can't do. We need less laws, not more.
And the real problem here is that we are going after The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement that other users committed. Now the media companies can still go after individuals who downloaded their content. Do you think that it is fair that they can recover damages twice for the same act of infringement? And how are we supposed to say that The Pirate Bay is entirely liable for the infringement that took place?
The Pirate Bay hates copyright. They know that most of their users are downloading infringing materials. But you can't prove it. And you can't point to a single act of actual infringement where you can identify somebody who completely downloaded an infringing file using a Pirate Bay tracker and/or a torrent file downloaded from The Pirate Bay. And even if you could, they could still raise the argument that they weren't directly involved because they don't know the user.
Maybe Sweden will get a DMCA and then The Pirate Bay will remove torrents based on complaints. Not that it would matter, really, because (a) torrents can be re-uploaded, (b) torrents are syndicated across many other torrent sites so you can always find the torrent that you want, and (c) copyright holders are too lazy to remove torrents.
It really isn't that hard to get a torrent removed, but none of them ever do it. There are plenty of automated programs. If you are CBS and go to mininova.org and search for "How I Met Your Mother", you get thousands of torrents. You can DMCA them (they accept notices). A software program could index all of those torrents in a few minutes.
This trial is just a big pile of crap. The MPAA spent millions of dollars propping up this prosecutor in order to make an example out of The Pirate Bay. And for what?
If The Pirate Bay loses, they will say, look we made an example out of them and we are committed to stopping the spread of piracy. Then they will spend the next year whining and ignoring the actual piracy. They might pick one company to sue or something.
And if they win, the MPAA will be even happier, because they can whine about how foreign countries don't respect US copyrights and how they are losing billions of dollars overseas to some guy who taped 15 seconds of a movie on his cell phone.