Copyright Protection Upheld

by RAY FLEMING
A SWEDISH court yesterday found the download site Pirate Bay, established in 2003, guilty of “assisting making available copyrighted content” free of charge and sentenced its four founders to jail for one year and to a fine of
3.8 million euros. In February Pirate Bay had 22 million users so the judgement was an important one for the consortium of 17 music, film and TV producers which brought the case - Sony, EMI, MGM and 20th Century Fox were among the companies claiming that, in effect, Pirate Bay and its collaborators were stealing their copyright material. Pirate Bay does not itself supply copyrighted material but provides access to other sites that do; its defence was that the prosecuting companies are “motivated by greed and inertia and want to prevent people sharing music and movies on a purely altruistic basis”. The Swedish court's ruling will probably have no immediate effect since the defendants have said they will appeal, a process that could take years.
Nonetheless it has established a precedent that says creative artists - writers, actors, directors, instrumentalists and others - and their production companies have a right to a return for their work. Yesterday's judgement is an endorsement of that view. There are also much wider implications, for instance for a shrinking global newspaper industry much of whose content is now made available on the internet before it can be bought at a newspaper shop.