Quote:
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“The trial of the Pirate Bay is an excellent example of how ugly, stupid companies motivated only by their greed and inertia, want to prevent people sharing music, movies, or anything, on a purely altruistic basis,” they said in a statement.
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It's quite rare that you hear a statement so dense with nonsense.
1) The Pirate Bay people didn't have "purely altruistic" motives.
2) People trading files aren't "sharing" anything. When you "share", you either a) give something to someone temporarily, b) give someone something to keep, leaving less for yourself, or c) keep something in a communal area where multiple people have access to it.
None of these definitions apply to this kind of "file sharing". The Pirate Bay was facilitating file
transfers, which resulted in
reproduction of files, not "sharing".
3) It's not just "ugly, stupid companies" that have a stake in this. Anyone who produces intellectual property has a stake in it.
I do
not think that DRM is the ultimate answer to this. DRM is a temporary, necessary evil while companies/IP providers figure out if there's an actual market for these things. (You can't really find that out if you essentially give them away right out of the gate.)
I would personally love to see all e-books distributed in open epub, MOBI, or (although I don't really like the format...) PDF format. Pirate Bay and similar sites slow that process down, though. If you know people can get something for free, you have a hard time justifying starting a venture to sell it to them. The venture itself costs money, after all.
I think this is a bad day for the Pirate Bay guys, but it might just be a good day for ebooks...