>It is headquartered in Sweden, although the servers that the site
> runs from are located in several different countries, including Thailand,
> Russia, and Belgium.

Add the Netherlands to that list. There's basically a mirror of the site running in a sever farm somewhere in Amsterdam.


> <snip> But The Pirate Bay has been unusually resilient, and it's not that the powers
> that be haven't noticed. <snip> The net result of the raid was that
> The Pirate Bay web site went down for three days. After the raid, the MPAA
> issued a press release proclaiming a great victory, and then the site was back
> up and running again.

That's how the pirate bay got 'mirrored' (probably not technically the correct term, but as close as i can get) in the Netherlands. Some group here played a large part in acquiring servers quickly after that raid to put a backup online.

<large snip>

> There are defiant
> resolutions about never buying movies or music from media companies again.
> (Which is hilarious: aren't these the people NOT buying them in the first
> place?) Many of the commenters don't have a shred of legal sense.

Well actually there have been studies saying that people who download the most music illegally are also the people buying the most music legally. I'd argue that the same goes for movies, although perhaps to a lesser extent (since watching a movie again is much less common than listening to a song again).

I agree with you comment on the commenters on most threads about this trial though. However I suspect this hold true for the vast majority of the internet.

Anyway, insightful piece overall, and I agree with most of it, but i tend to lean a bit more towards the file sharer's point of view for two reasons:

The first is TV series. I like a couple of TV series that are produced and first aired in the US. Things like Lost, House, Heroes. I could download these just hours after an episode is shown in the US, or i could wait anywhere between 6 months and infinity until it gets shown here in The Netherlands. Buying a DVD boxset is another option, but then I will have to wait until the season has ended.

And waiting is not what I want. I talk daily to people that live in the US that like those same shows, and talk about it. I want to keep up with them, since in 6 months they might have forgotten most of the episode that finally airs here, and are certainly not as inclined to discuss it as the most recently aired episode over there.

This leaves me with but one alternative, and it's torrent sites. It's basically 99% of what I use bittorrent for.

The second reason is that the practice of sharing things is a very human activity. Now usually sharing has a benefit (rise in status, just to make yourself feel good, etc) since it also has a cost. With this particular form of sharing though, nobody actually loses a physical thing. Bits get copied is all that basically happens.

Now there are some big companies who see revenue loss for every copy of every album/movie/etc that gets copied this way. But when the cost for a copy is zero, there is a high chance that someone might download something he would never buy. Thus no lost sale, just another potential future customer that might otherwise never have sampled what they had to offer.

Now, not every copy is like this. Some people are avoiding the costs by downloading for free. But the way the RIAA/MPAA and their counterparts all over the world are treating the numbers is dishonest.

Your solutions would work for most (though not all) products. But barring a total decline into fascism (not very likely) filesharing is never going to go away, that is one thing I am quite certain off.