So today I stumbled across the BBC article on The Video Bay (‘http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8123989.stm’).

I’ve been following the story of Pirate Bay and their court case since it was first mentioned on the internet. I must admit I was surprised that they were found guilty, I’m not saying Pirate Bay is legitimate, but within Swedish Law I was pretty certain they had covered themselves pretty well.

Anyway for those who haven’t followed it here is my stupidly short summary of it all:

• Lawsuit filed against The Pirate Bay founders for a number of charges
• Half the charges filed against them were dropped after there was insufficient proof (and I think the lawyer got a little bit confused about what The Pirate Bay actually did)
• The Pirate Bay founders were found guilty of sharing copyrighted material, were given a jail sentence and a large fine, the founders said they would appeal the decision and wouldn’t pay the fines as they didn’t have the money and even if they did, they still wouldn’t pay
• The judge of the TPB (The Pirate Bay) case was found to be a member of numerous copyright authorities, hence their appeal was made on this basis
• They then struggled to find a judge to consider their appeal who wasn’t a member of a copyright authority. When they did find a suitable judge the appeal was dismissed due to the judges reasoning that whether a judge is part of a copyright authority or not is irrelevant.
• The founders lawyer managed to get enough support within Sweden to get ‘The Pirates’ a seat in the Swedish court of law (or something like that).

That was the last of the articles I have read apart from the BBC one mentioned above. Now a couple of things I have to mention in the middle of all this, during the above events TPB played a nice april fools joke by saying TPB had teamed up with Warner Bro’s to distribute content, and secondly TPB founders are still free men.

So it all sounds like they have been used to make an example out of, but their has been very little in terms of payment, so it is JUST an example.

Then the founders decided to create The Video Bay, which is going to rival YouTube. So far they only have some examples of the site, making use of HTML5 to embed and play it’s contents. The examples so far have some copyrighted music videos, of which I’m sure they have gained permission :-S.

All in all, TPB is showing to everyone that they won’t just be stopped, this is evident in their actions to not let the lawsuit filed against them drop, they continue to operate Pirate Bay (which I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned in the ruling, demanding the site be removed from the internet or something along those lines) and now intend to release The Video Bay. What content will be on it once released, or as they like to put it, whenever they get round to working on it, I’m not sure but if users can just upload content copyrighted or not, this could be very interesting to see how long it lasts. Especially when you consider how even youtube has had problem with copyrighted material on it’s site.

Eitherway, hats off to TPB (not just the founders but everyone who is apart of it), while I don’t condone with people downloading copyrighted material, I do agree with many of the ethics that TPB stand for and agree that this is something which has gone a bit wrong with the cost of media.

One interesting thing you could also consider – if torrenting didn’t exist, napster was never made and any of its following clones (limewire, bearshare, etc.) would we have all gone out, bought CD’s, DVD’s etc, and if we did, would the environment and global warming take a bit of hit from all those plastic cases, paper and cardboard sleeves etc??

Final note – Spotify is to music, what The Video Bay is to video??

Ramblin over . . . .