Pirates by Any Name

   Before taking this class, I thought that copyright laws were basically so strict that you couldn't use anything copyrighted without going through tons and tons of legal procedure. You couldn't use music in a video or presentation, or even play it in public places. You couldn't show video clips without creating your own original animations, and even that's creative copyright. Now, I know that there are ways, not many, but some specific ways to use copyrighted materials under fair use. I thought you had to be completely original to keep from violating laws, but it's not true.

   One example of a piracy lawsuit I found was Pirate Bay v Sweden. In it, the caretakers and possible creators of the site, thepiratebay, were put on trial for creating their pirating site. The main defense was that the creators did not actually pirate anything themselves, but only facilitated the pirating of other things with a service that could be used to distribute media legally. The final ruling was that they aided in the process of pirating and were sentenced to one year in jail and fined $3.5 million in damages.

   The guys from piratebay seemed to be protected by the same idea that protected YouTube and Veoh, that the creators never directly took place in pirating, and therefore could not be prosecuted. But when you create a service that uses peer to peer sharing, a service used almost exclusively for pirating, and name your site "thepiratebay," it's pretty obvious what the original intentions of the site were. They may not have pirated, but they caused the pirating of millions of dollars worth of entertainment and software. They were an accessory to the crime.