Doomed

The content mafia are use to ganging up on people. Their problem is that there are far too many people to gang up on. In fact internet users who actually know about this whole saga probably outnumber them 10k to one.

The fact is that whether or not the pirate bay survives is irrelevant. A so called "victory" over piracy in the form of shutting TPB down would be completely meaningless.

Anyone remember napster?

You shut them down & a dozen came up.

Wait, remember Lycos MP3 search?

They were shut down too.

Remember when Warez sites were big?

Recall anything about private FTPs and ratios??

Seriously, the content mafia have been fighting a losing battle ever since they started fighting.


Companies and associations in disguise like the MPAA/RIAA & their kin remind me of an angry little child.
They cannot have it their way anymore & they refuse to change. They stomp their feet & cry. They attack and hit whoever they can because they are frustrated.

Think of the poor artists they cry! but they have been systematically screwing artists over ever since they conceived the notion of record deals.

Let me give you a good deal; we, the internet majority do not NEED you. For all intents and purposes you have become obsolete.
We have the technology today to deal with artists DIRECTLY. To purchase moveies DIRECTLY.

This means we no longer need to pay off a string of merry men & their little ladder of payoffs to whomever they think was a good boy this year.
We no longer need to pay for film associations, for cinema chains, for distributers...in fact with a direct access internet movie model we could very well be getting rid of 80% of the middlemen.

The so caled pirates that steal the food from their children's mouths would never buy anything they could not have gotten for free. The so called loss of revenue is a myth.

Close TPB down, close mininova, close demonoid, close moviex, close all of them.

What will that achieve?

Nothing.


Maybe it's time to wisen up & think of what people want & how to give it to them for a price they are willing to pay.

Downloads?

But isn't Pirate Bay an indexing service? They don't actually host any files for download.

Appeal

Andreas could be freed of the charges if he appeas to a higher instance. It's what happened with the last file sharer that got sentenced in Sweden.

Standing Ovation

Very very nicely written SomeoneSpecial.
To reiterate some your points, I'd like to point out that the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, not the Recording Artist Association of America. I'd like to see the numbers on what % of CD price goes towards artist, producer, manufacturer, retailer, ie the people who deserve it, vs to the label who does nothing but decide that Miley Cyrus is what the masses "want" to listen to.

With this newfangled interweb thing we even get to cut out the manufacturer cost and most of retailer cost (web store cost << brick&mortar store cost)

I can only imagine these record contracts. For every $1 you earn, we earn $3, but you won't earn anything without us. Oh, and you can't do anything unless we approve it. Sign your soul away.

Boohoo for all the recording "industry" people who will lose their jobs, maybe you should have thought about the morality of your profession before you chose it. You probably also didn't read your mortgage document before you signed it and now you wonder why you are living in your car. "What?, but my monthly payments were only $500 with a $250,000 balloon payment, I mean I make like $15000 a year working at mcdonalds so like... damn I wish I remembered 5th grade math."

the pushers of manufactured 'entertainment'

Exactly: the notion that any of these screwballs gave the slightest care about the 'artists' they represent is total bs.

They make money off other people's talent, or, they force-feed talentless idiots to blanket-cover the media broadcasts.

The real issue is that they dislike their pimp-status being taken from them, and they don't like it when real people decide what they want to see and hear, rather than it being told them or just made up:

I've been in videostores for example, and they have charts up already with films in at number-whatever, and the movies haven't even been released yet! So no-one's even rented them yet, yet they shamelessly plank them in their made-up fake charts anyway.

'it's not fair! no-one will sell out to us anymore if they can just sell their records and films directly off a webpage!'

I'm betting also that most copy-shares wouldn't have been bought anyway in the first place, they're only downloading them because they are free.