It's raining torrents!

Kick Start
This year seems to have kicked off with a bang on all things copyright related. First we had amazon.co.uk launching their DRM-free MP3 download service and hot on their heels came Apple's long-overdue decision to remove the copy protection from their catalogue too (all sing with me "I see a little silhouette of a price war...").

The British Government published their Digital Britain report which included recommendations for ISPs to take a more active part in halting illegal file sharing.

Then came the news that New Zealand seems to be ignoring civil-rights and going for an approach on copyright infringement that can best be summed up as "I think he's guilty so he must be" which flies in the face of western judicial practice.

Now there's the latest update in another long-running saga; Sweden vs The Pirate Bay, one of the largest indexes of torrents currently available.

The Technology
In case you aren't familiar with torrents they are the latest incarnation of Peer-to-peer filesharing (P2P) which works by having users all over the world sharing content with each other via programs like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent emerged in 2001 and takes the technology to a new level where a torrent file is created which contains information about the location of multiple (could be thousands) of seeds or users which are sharing that file. Once a user downloads a file they can then become a new seed which allows the numbers of available downloads to grow exponentially. Torrent data is estimated by some to make up to 35% of all internet traffic.

The Pirate Bay
So that's BitTorrent explained but to explain why there's all the fuss about it you need to look at what's being shared and while it can be used to download the latest Linux distribution it's more commonly used to share copyright music, video and software... which the entertainment and computing industrial giants would rather didn't happen.

The Pirate Bay, created in 2003 and hosted in Sweden, is probably the world's largest tracker of these torrent files and you can tell from it's name which side of the fence they sit on when it comes to copyright. Over the last few years it's been raided by police, been on the defending and prosecuting sides of a number of lawsuits and even attempted to buy Sealand, the micronation located about 6 miles off the Sussex coast, to use to host their servers.

Half time scores - The Pirate Bay 1, Sweden 0
Now the site's founders and admins Carl Lundström, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg are in court in Sweden accused of copyright infringement however it has quickly become apparent that the prosecuting lawyers don't actually understand the technology they are trying to shut down, presumably only driven by their share in the multimillion pound potential damages being claimed.

The key to their defence is that the site is a tracker or index of the torrents themselves and that even the torrents are only lists of users sharing a particular file. They don't make copies themselves or host it so while you've probably got views on their moral standpoint it's a lot harder to actually go after them legally.
If you take the prosecution to it's natural extension then you need to sue search engines like Google for listing sites that host or link to copyright material (actually that's an even better case to prosecute since Google actually maintains a copy of every site it indexes). Hey, let's sue the ISPs for giving us access to the whole damn shooting match in the first place.

These suggestions have been flying around on tech sites like The Register but it's crossed into mainstream reporting with Charles Arthur writing in the Guardian with a discussion on who would actually benefit from the demise of The Pirate Bay.

So an entire day and a half into the big copyright test case the prosecutors have been left with egg on their faces as charges are amended to remove "complicity in the production of copyrighted material" and replace it with "complicity to make (copyrighted material) available" which isn't quite the same thing.

What next?
General opinion on the blogosphere is that The Pirate Bay are going to go on to win the rest of the case but even if they don't the final charge will be much less dramatic than the claimants hoped for. Regardless of what happens to this particular site the torrents are still out there and there's plenty of other trackers around so will it even make a difference? In a similar arena, Kazaa and Limewire still allow easy P2P sharing years after the high-profile cases against Napster.

There are suggestions that users who download illegal copies are actually more likely to go on to spend on the legal versions, Charles Arthur's belief is that they will revert to more casual networks of friends sharing these materials but my view is that the internet is a big bad place and shutting down a single index might slow things down for a while but it's not going to stop it

For the moment we wait to see what's coming next in the Swedish case.