Courtesy of Andy Kessler
Pirates are all over the news this year. They were off the coast of Somalia … and now they’re in Sweden? In April, a Stockholm court handed down a guilty verdict for "accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law" to the four owners of the Web site Pirate Bay, who now each face up to one year in prison.
Their crime? Setting up a site that allows 22 million users--and that number is growing--to search for and find pointers to (mostly) copyrighted material on the Internet. These so-called torrents are easily downloadable, perfect digital copies of music, TV shows, movies and, as it’s known on the Web, pr0n. Outraged at their courts, Swedish citizens got the last laugh when the three-year-old Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the early June European Union elections, guaranteeing it a seat in the European Parliament. Argh.
The funny thing is, Pirate Bay doesn’t even host any copyrighted material for download, only directions to find it. If I were Google CEO Eric Schmidt, I’d hold off on that trip to Europe this summer. Because type "The Climb lyrics" into Google and you get pages of links to other Web sites with copyrighted lyrics to this Miley Cyrus song. Type in "Hannah Montana the Movie torrent," and you have a choice of download sites for a copy of the movie, all one click away. That’s "accessory and conspiracy," if you ask me.
Fortunately, we in the U.S. rarely pay attention to Swedish laws. Did you know it’s illegal in Sweden to repaint a house without a license and the government’s permission? But along the lines of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remark--"Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?"--I say bring on the Pirate Party!
Copyright law and its interpretations have been a mess for years. I’m always amused by pay-per-use Xerox machines in libraries bearing a warning label not to copy copyrighted material--as if there was any other reason for the copier to be there. In 1998 Congress was happy to pass an extension to existing regulation, practically written by Disney, that extends artist’s copyrights well beyond their deaths. Google
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
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