Pirates

Pirates drive this bus around Sweden

More on the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, which the American mainstream news media are not covering (perhaps fearful of giving the pirates too much publicity? esp given that they are in the IP business themselves?):

Last week, Gizmodo predicted doom and gloom for BitTorrent sharing if the Pirate Bay is shut down.

On the second day of the trial, half the charges were dropped. Now PB stands accused only of making copyrighted works available rather than also of producing such works.

TorrentFreak has details of goings-on inside and outside the courthouse. They seemed especially delighted in reporting the prosecuting attorney's inability to get his PowerPoint to work in the courtroom. PP failure is always a sign of something.

Wired sez the trial has a rock-star quality, whatever that means. The writer had to pay a scalper $60 to get inside the courthouse. My fave part of the report: "Your correspondent was served homemade 'Creative Commons' cookies by teenage girls in fantasy genre garb. They said they wanted to support the good forces of the world and convert bad ones to their cause." Don't we all.

The Twitter search term #spectrial is the place for many Twittered links and responses. (The PB site trial.piratebay.com has been down for days.)

Wikipedia has many details missing in other places.

This LAT article from 2007 gives the MSM two-sides take on PB and piracy as a threat to the major media companies. But it's not just pushing the MPAA's propaganda, which I guess is nice.

A Trial Edition of Steal This Film is available for download. (The first two installments, Steal This Film Part 1 and 2, are streaming on Google Video.) Short version: Information wants to be free.