The Pirate Bay on the politics of copyright, Globe and Mail, 4/17/09

Via Globe and Mail; The Pirate Bay on the politics of copyright:

"Earlier Friday morning a Swedish judge found four men connected with the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay guilty of contributing to copyright violations.

Already online observers are calling the decsision a monumental shift in the battle over copyright protection.

The landmark decision has each of the four men facing a year in jail and collective fines of $3.6-million (U.S.).

The Pirate Bay is a sort of underground Google for downloadable media files, where users can seach for and look up music, movies and tv shows to download using a file sharing technology known as BitTorrent. The music and movie industries say that most of the files the Pirate Bay links to infringe on copyrights and have made the site Enemy No. 1 in their fight against piracy.
Pirate Bay has more than 22 million users worldwide on an average day, its tracking system has been accessed more than 4 billion times and some experts believe that the site accounts for as much as two thirds of the world's torrent files. "

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090417.wgtpiratebaypodcast0417/BNStory/Technology/home

RIAA Appeals Jammie Thomas Mistrial - Wired.com, 10/15/08

RIAA Appeals Jammie Thomas Mistrial:

"The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing last month's decision in the Jammie Thomas case in which a judge declared a mistrial in the nation's only RIAA file sharing case to go to trial.

On Sept. 24, a Minnesota federal judge overturned a $222,000 judgment levied against the mother of three after concluding he erroneously told jurors that they could ding Thomas for copyright infringement solely for making copyrighted music available on the Kazaa file sharing network."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/riaa-appealing.html