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Posts Tagged ‘file sharing’

We had previously written about the conviction of The Pirate Bay operators and the controversy over the trial and the website, now the new owners of The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s largest file sharing websites, is planning to legalise the site.

A spokesperson for the new owners – Global Gaming Factory X – Chief Executive Hans Pandeya, said the site will not become a pure pay site. “For the great majority it will be free of charge, for a minority it will actually make them money, and for a small portion it will cost them,” he said.

Mr Pandeya claims the site will fully address the legal issues that troubled it before because income will be distributed between file sharers, copyright holders and others involved.

In April 2009, four men connected to The Pirate Bay site were sentenced to one-year prison terms and ordered to pay fines totalling US$3.8 million for violations of copyright law. These judgements again highlight the controvery over peer to peer file sharing. Closer to home iiNet is still battling the copyright owners over alleged peer to peer copyright infringement by users of its network.

Tags: file sharing, internet law, IT Law, IT Lawyers
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In what appears to be a systematic global piracy crack down, and hot on the heels of the iiNet case, copyright owners including Warner Bros, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI are seeking approximately $18million in damages from file sharing website The Pirate Bay in a Swedish Court.

In the claim it is alleged that the website was used in the infringement of copyright, by allowing pirated movies, music, software and computer games to be downloaded.

In their defence, The Pirate Bay (yes a very unfortunate name in this type of matter) claims that no copyrighted material is stored on its servers, and no exchange of files actually takes place on them, that they are not responsible for any copyright infringement.

In addition to the potential damages claim, the four men who operate the site could face up to 2 years imprisonment.

The success of cases like this will do very little to stop global intellectual property infringement, but what is may do is reduce the number of people prepared to take the risk of deriving a commercial benefit from operating these types of file sharing sites.

Tags: copyright infringement, file sharing, isp law, IT Law, IT Lawyer, technology law, technology lawyers
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