This House Would Recognize 'The Pirate Bay' As Wrongly Convicted.

I intend to prove that, contrary to Pro's assertions, The Pirate Bay was rightly convicted of committing piracy and, regardless of how popular pirating copyrighted works is in the world, it is nonetheless a violation of very long-standing international copyright laws and while I concur that some lawsuits have been ridiculous (for instance, the makers of Napster -- which, in this case, would equate to prosecuting the makers of BitTorrent), the owners of the media being pirated nonetheless have an international legal right to protect their works, and through international copyright law, Sweden is bound to abide by these agreements or face being cut off from international trade. That ThePirateBay could be considered by anyone of having no intention of illegally distributing copyrighted works is ludicrous and falls flat the moment you read the group's very name -- The Pirate Bay. For crying out loud, PIRATE -is- their middle name! I would not expect legally "copylefted" / "public domain" works to be the dominant resource The Pirate Bay provides, nor do I think any reasonable person would. The nature of BitTorrent is one master site provides the seed -- unlike other peer-to-peer apps which are essentially 'serverless' (or more accurately, every client is also a server), BitTorrent relies on 'seed' sites. The Pirate Bay, then, did not merely provide an ability for its service users to share their own files freely, The Pirate Bay itself willfully and intentionally had to seed these copyrighted works it never obtained permission to distribute. == REBUTTALS TO PRO'S ARGUMENTS == First point - A court has no authority to enforce Sweden's copyright laws? I fail to understand why not, and I could not find any "ironclad" reasoning in your "My first point" paragraph. Could you elaborate? Secondly - If everybody committed murder, would that make it right? Because so many people ignore traffic safety laws, should we just get rid of them? Enforceability is NOT a legitimate meter of whether or not a law is just. Just because it is hard to enforce, does not make it a wrong law -- by the same token, because a law would be easy to enforce would not make it a "right" law. Whether something is easy or hard to enforce has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on its legitimacy. Third - I concur wholeheartedly that it is time for an evolution in the entertainment industry, but I gather my idea for such an evolution is different than yours, and mine has nothing to do with violating copyrights nor intellectual copyrights. I happen to know some musicians, and while some give some of their music away for free, hey they need to eat too. Artists have a right to profit from their work, and no one else has a right to distribute their work without the artist's permission (or by extension, someone the artist has hired or otherwise authorized to manage protection of their creative works). The media companies cannot yet create a 'web dictatorship' in terms of regulating what you say, criticize, etc. , but they have every right (and always have) to stop you from pirating their intellectual property. You did not spend long hours and weeks composing, practicing and recording a song, why should you have the right to do what you damned please from it? The Berne convention was established more than a century ago to regulate international copyright. Virtually every modern nation subscribes to it, and those that do not are excluded from a lot of international trade. Digital distribution is just the latest twist to this agreement originally intended to protect artists and authors from unauthorized copying and distribution of their work. If you want to complain that big media companies have too much control, then stop buying their stuff. Don't copy it illegally, just don't buy it -- boycott it all, and either spend the time to learn to make the music, videos and art you enjoy, or buy from independent artists. If you want to "tear down the (big media) establishment," do so with becoming a bonafide patron of "garage band" artists and declare your independence from the RIAA, MPAA and similar groups.