Torrents Are Not Illegal

[sheepdog 10]

How can a severe rain storm be illegal?????Who you going to prosecute, God? Honestly, I wish I knew what you guys are talking about half the time. A torent is big downpouring of rain as far as I know about.

[Soviet Rathe 1]

Haha I have over 50gigs of Full quality mp3's and over 10gigs of programs (dont delete this post)

TPB has a very interesting story

A trial began in Norway on Monday in which the entertainment industry wants a major service provider to block access to The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine.
Norwegian operator Telenor refused to block access to the site in June after it received a petition for a temporary injunction from a group of copyright holders, including the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Telenor maintains it will preserve access to The Pirate Bay barring a court order. Under Norwegian law, a service provider is not responsible for illegal activities enabled by providing Internet access, Telenor contends. The trial, in the district court for Asker and Bćrum, is expected to last five days, according to a court official.

The Pirate Bay is a search engine and tracker for torrents, which are small files that enable the download of data from multiple sources on a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. The content is not stored by The Pirate Bay but instead on individual users' PCs around the world.

After legal trouble in its home country of Sweden, The Pirate Bay's operators have now distributed the servers that run the site around the world, although ISPs are easily able to block access to the domain.

The Pirate Bay -- one of the most popular BitTorrent sites -- has been a frequent target for the entertainment industry, with lawsuits filed other countries such as Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands.

In Denmark, some operators block The Pirate Bay while others don't, while in Italy efforts to block the site failed. A Netherlands court recently fined three men associated with The Pirate Bay for failing to block access to the site, but the case is on appeal.

The Pirate Bay Verdict and the Future of File Sharing
The verdict against the founders of The Pirate Bay is being hailed by many as a triumphant win against illegal file-sharing. The four men involved in the BitTorrent tracking site were found guilty on Friday of being accessories to violating copyright law. A Swedish court sentenced each of them to a year in jail and a collective fine of $3.6 million.

In the long run, though, the verdict may not be as significant as some suggest when it comes to the battle against online file-sharing. Does the name Napster ring a bell?
The Pirate Bay Ruling

As was the case with Napster, The Pirate Bay doesn't actually host copyrighted files -- it simply allows users to post links to material hosted on third-party servers. That's why, incidentally, prosecutors ended up dropping the initial charge of "assisting copyright infringement" and pursuing only a "assisting making available copyrighted material" charge instead.

"The court said even if you are distributed, you are nevertheless encouraging your customers to violate copyright, and we'll hold you accountable," explains Steve Chang, an attorney specializing in intellectual property matters with Banner & Witcoff.

Napster, of course, ended up effectively boarding up as a result of its lengthy court battle (which, by the way, began exactly one decade ago this December). The Pirate Bay, though, isn't going anywhere yet. Its founders have already indicated they plan to appeal, and the case is expected to head as high as the Supreme Court. Many legal experts expect it could be years before a final verdict is reached.

"It took the entertainment industry three years to get this first verdict," a member of the Swedish "Pirate Party" tells The Register . "If they think they're going to make people stop file sharing, then they're living in a fantasy world."
Beyond the Courts

The bigger issue is that unlike Napster, The Pirate Bay and other modern peer-to-peer-oriented networks are far less centralized and simple to shut down. And, even if The Pirate Bay itself were somehow to be shuttered, there are countless other comparable tracking services all over the world. Could they all be targeted and taken down? It's highly unlikely.

But let's take it a step further. Let's say this whole thing plays out in the high court and The Pirate Bay loses. Let's say BitTorrent completely ceases to exist as a result. (Just play along for a minute.) Would that, then, be the end of online file-sharing?

The answer: of course not. Even in that extreme (and extremely unlikely) scenario, little would be accomplished in the grand scheme of things. Technology is constantly evolving. Just as more advanced decentralized peer-to-peer networks sprung up in the wake of Napster's shutdown, new alternatives would surface once again were a site like The Pirate Bay to lower its sails. Already, countless other methods exist for exchanging data with ease, and more will only pop up as the months wear on.

"In the big scheme of things, piracy is always going to happen," Chang says. "The ramification of this [ruling] is possibly providing the next evolution."
The Evolution

That evolution has already begun. Just recently, The Pirate Bay team prepared a new service called IPREDator, set to launch publicly any day now. It allows people to surf the Net more anonymously using a virtual private network, or VPN. Unlike other VPN services, The Pirate Bay promises its IPREDator will keep no logs of customer activity and therefore could never turn user information over to authorities.

and after all that TPB is still running

Cheers

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

However a good amount of the files in the torrents on the Pirate Bay's trackers are illegal in most countries. Only a few countries have no copyright laws for these files, which is why The Pirate Bay is hosted where it is now.