By jndrum

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Pirate Bay (piratebay.org), I’ve been following this story for a while. Basically, it’s a torrent-tracking site that allows users to find pretty much any content seeded on the network During a random search on Feburary 1, 2009, The Pirate Bay reported 3, 438, 560 registered users (registered users have profiles indicating which torrents they have available in HTML format on the website). Unregistered users made up a population of 9,888,928 seeders and 12,040,264 leechers. The IFPI reports in its 2008 Piracy Report that filesharing accounts for 80% of the traffic on the internet, but only 20% of all Internet users are doing it. In other words, 80% of the information that’s passed through the Internet is content that comes from filesharing protocols.

Back to the Pirate Bay, the operators claim that the IFPI has no authority over the intellectual property they make available because it is in torrent form (bits and pieces of copyrighted/non-copyrighted content). As they say in a response email to WBR (posted on their website):

“Do you actually claim to own the copyright of these 160 bit hash values?
Since there is an infinite number of possible files that would produce the same hashes, would they also violate it?”

This is something that's really important. period. All parties need to tread lightly in this situation.

http://thepiratebay.org/legal