The Pirate Bay is back. Just this Saturday, after two months in hiatus, the most notorious P2P file sharing site is operating again. The site was finally considered illegal by Swedish authorities after many years in operation and was taken down last December after Swedish police seized its servers and other equipment. It wasn’t the first time but the site remained in operation due to various legal hurdles and technicalities. During the downtime, fans or subsidiaries somehow kept a clone of the site running in limited mode with a running countdown, providing an indication that the site will return.
Return it did and is back as if nothing happened, except for the Phoenix (back from the dead) logo and a few 404 errors in its links. The site is quite tenacious because of the dynamic nature of the internet. You can take down a site’s servers, but like any good IT project that has backups and extra equipment, it can always come back running in a different location. The situation is the same with other peer-to-peer file sharing sites such as Demonoid and KickAsstorrents. As long as their owners are at large, as long as there are countries and hosting services willing to host their sites and as long as there are funds to purchase equipment, they can always come back.
Efforts by various governments have been made to curb the activities of P2P sites like Pirate Bay through complaints by movie, television, music, publishing and other industries affected by copyright infringements. Millions are lost in potential sales due to P2P. One good example was the third Expendables film by Sylvester Stallone which didn’t fare well at the box office due to a leaked screening copy days before the film was scheduled for release. The film was entertaining and earned a modest amount at the box office which could have been more had the ‘normal’ screening-to-pirated copy schedule had been followed. An earlier takedown of Pirate Bay could have helped the movie since Pirate Bay is the go-to site for getting movie torrents. The takedown of the Pirate Bay is a symbolic yet short-lived milestone for anti-piracy advocates meaning that curbing piracy by shutting down piracy-promoting sites is possible. Megaupload and Limewire are good examples.
Seizures and takedowns of sites like Pirate Bay however have little effect due to the slow processes of Western-style justice systems. In Megaupload’s case, the owner Kim Dotcom, one of piracy and internet freedom’s biggest advocates, has yet to be extradited back to the United States on charges of copyright violation. Kim is currently based in New Zealand where he is fighting extradition through legal or extra-legal means. And while at large, he is free to set up other businesses such as his new MEGA file hosting site. The same happened with Pirate Bay’s owners as the site can operate as long as conviction has yet to be passed on their respective charges or until their next arrest.
File-sharing through P2P or torrent technology is a valid means of sharing and distribution of very large content especially for countries that are bandwidth challenged. This argument is often used by file-sharing services as they can actually be used by businesses, governments and individuals in distributing non-copyrighted content such as home videos, free music, large databases and even test versions of software and operating systems. These businesses can be valid subscribers to P2P sites along with other unscrupulous users and ‘well-meaning’ individuals. There is also the argument that the site strictly services the community through file-sharing and states in their user policies that they are not liable to what their subscribers upload and distribute. That it takes time to weed out the content if they actually perform their own housekeeping at all. Takedowns happen when law enforcement reconcile the country’s copyright laws with the site’s business permit and the finding of evidence of willful distribution.
So can governments actually control torrents and piracy on the internet? The answer depends on the government and its underlying laws. In Western-style governments, the internet is viewed as one of the last bastions of free speech and free expression including freedom of content-sharing. Due process will always be done until enough evidence has been gathered that something akin to a crime has been committed. Once the crime has been determined such as copyright violation, there is a long litigation process depending on how much resources or legal clout the defendant has and finally conviction where the will start a long process of appeals after which the defendant goes to jail, his/her resources sequestered or goes free. Then the cycle begins anew.
In other countries such as the middle-east like in Syria and Iran where free speech is taboo, the internet is only a source of controlled entertainment, business and information. The same goes with China and North Korea. Even Singapore monitors its internet for torrents as its laws view them as illegal despite its validity as a file-transfer mechanism. The only way for these countries to enjoy things like P2P is by using virtual private networks or VPNs. Recently, China has started to crack down on VPNs as well.
It’s only by a strict no-holds barred definition of laws can a government stop piracy channeled through peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. If a country for example would declare torrents illegal, what’s left will be bandwidth-throttling file sharing sites in which a law or warrants would be crafted where authorities can scan contents for suspected copyrighted material.
For now, anti-piracy advocates and copyright owners earned two months of lowered piracy rates with the temporary takedown of Pirate Bay. Eventually, Pirate Bay could go the way of Megaupload and Limewire when its servers run out of places to relocate. Piracy has been around for a long, long time even before the internet, even before computers, and swords and prosthetic limbs were the norm. Winning a war is difficult and content proprietors for now should be satisfied to win battles.
