Privacy Digest

The Internet sure loves its outlaws - Los Angeles Times: "THEY may not wield battle-axes or wear horned helmets like their Viking forebears, but today's Swedish pirates are still wreaking some pretty heavy-duty havoc.

The Pirate Bay file-sharing collective, one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading, is only the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright %u2014 or pro-piracy %u2014 movement that is striking terror in the heart of an industry that seems ever less capable of stopping it.

When the Pirate Bay's Stockholm headquarters were raided last May and their servers seized, the Motion Picture Assn. of America thought it had scored a major victory. 'Swedish Authorities Sink Pirate Bay,' trumpeted its news release. (As has since been pointed out, this is a mixed metaphor.) But the rejoicing didn't last long. The site was back online three days later, and worse yet for Hollywood, the raid and several mass protests afterward generated so much sympathy for the pro-file sharing cause that both candidates for prime minister announced publicly that they did not think young file-sharers should be treated as criminals.

Sweden's state-registered Pirate Party also benefited from the raid's fallout. Its membership has now grown to almost 9,000, closing in on the nation's Green Party (9,550), which holds 19 seats in Parliament.

But the renegades back at the Pirate Bay don't care for politics. They are, after all, pirates. The group's website is a database of 500,000 copied movies, TV shows, songs, games and software titles. Instead of pointing you directly to a downloadable song or movie %u2014 like Napster used to %u2014 the Pirate Bay provides a kind of digital treasure map. The map, called a torrent file, points your computer toward all the little fragments of the booty that are hidden around the Internet. Feed the torrent file to your downloading software, wait a couple of hours, and ta-da! You now have a shiny new copy of 'The Bourne Supremacy.'

Also, you have become a criminal.

Well, join the club. The Pirate Bay alone claims more than 5 million active users. According to Internet traffic ranker Alexa.com, it's the 292nd most popular site in the world. (Netflix is 382; the U.S. Postal Service is 385; Wal-Mart is 391.) Some estimates say that file sharing accounts for 80% of the Internet traffic generated by home users. Last year, the MPAA released the results of a study it had commissioned to gauge the effects of illegal copying. In 2005, the report said, the worldwide motion picture industry lost more than $7 billion as a result of Internet piracy."

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