This just in: four founders of Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay have each been sentenced to a year in jail, and have been assessed an additional fine of $3.6 million.
The PirateBay never copied, hosted, or distributed any copyrighted material. All the site did was provide a search engine indexing and linking to text files known as "torrents" that provided instructions to users about how to share specific pieces of content (some copyrighted, others legally free to distribute). In other words, it didn't do anything different than Google, Yahoo, or a million other indexes of Internet content.
Not only does this ruling pose a tremendous potential chilling effect to free speech, it also marks a problematic incursion of U.S. industry and legal institutions into foreign markets and sovereignties.
And here's the icing on the cake: although people certainly used the Pirate Bay to download tons of unpermissioned copyrighted material, the jailing of its founders won't even mark a blip in the inevitable transformation of the media industry from a retail to a service model. In plainer English, the record labels and movie studios won't save a single, solitary dime as a result of this verdict.
Everyone with a brain in the media industry (a surprisingly large subset) knows that the traditional models of remuneration are over, and there's no turning back. Information goods are transforming into something more akin to a utility -- a fact the labels and studios are acknowledging by attempting to license at the ISP level, and supporting ever more on-demand services, from Netflix to Hulu to Spotify. Furthermore, recorded music is increasingly seen even within the industry as a marketing tool for the really profitable touring and merchandising industries. Warner Music Group has tacitly acknowledged this by announcing last year that all new artist contracts will be "360 deals," in which the label participates in the full gamut of a recording artist's revenues, far beyond simply keeping the wholesale on record retail.
So if the labels and studios are resigned to the structural changes of their industries, and the closure of a BitTorrent tracker will have zero effect on revenues, what's the reason for this trial, and for the amazingly punitive sentence? Pure and simple: the Pirate Bay founders are being hanged as an effigy for all of us. This is a pure act of spectacle, calculated to make us, the world citizens of digital culture, frightened and guilty for our sin of independence.
The only question is: will it work, or will the backlash catalyze an even greater revolt against the dominance of the gatekeepers?
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