Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. He has been named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, and shortlisted as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. He has been named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, and shortlisted as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.

This week, a Dutch court in The Hague ordered the censorship of The Pirate Bay to be lifted, calling it ineffective.

This creates hope that an until-now technophobic court system is starting to listen less to obsolete middlemen, and more to research, facts and liberties. Let's look at the effects.

It was always a given that a court-ordered censorship of any website would be ineffective to the point of never being noticed at all. The Internet doesn't lend itself to censorship – it was designed to withstand a full-scale nuclear war and is certainly capable of dealing with the odd judge who lends their ear too much to an obsolete and panicked middleman industry. So far, every attempt at censorship – for let's call a spade a spade here – has just served to draw more attention to The Pirate Bay.

It's important that the court ruled the censorship ineffective, and therefore ordered it discontinued. Any limitations of so-called fundamental rights, of which the right to correspondence is one, must meet three criteria – they must be necessary, effective and proportionate. That is, there must be an identified need for them, the proposed solution must meet that need, and it mustn't cause worse damage in the process.

By ruling that censorship is ineffective (instead of just abstaining from ruling it effective), the Dutch court effectively made further censorship of The Pirate Bay impossible across all of Europe. This is tremendously good news, and we should expect to see previously misguided courts in countries like Denmark and the UK follow this ruling, lifting their corresponding misguided censorship.

When something like this happens, one question invariably pops up: "If file sharing is legal, how will the artists get paid?" This is a red herring, a distraction, for three reasons.

First, large-scale file sharing has been a reality since 1999 and Napster, and during that time, there has been a massive wealth transfer from the previous gatekeeper middlemen to newly-minted artists. Legal or not, 250 million Europeans and 150 million Americans are doing it. According to a Norwegian study, the average income of musicians has risen 114 percent since the advent of large-scale online sharing of culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopolies. The artists themselves are doing better than ever.

Second, today's copyright monopoly structures make sure that 99.99 percent of artists never see a cent in copyright royalties. The overwhelming majority, 99 percent of artists never get signed with one of the gatekeeper middlemen, and out of those who do get signed, 99 percent of those never see a cent in royalty. It comes across as very odd to defend a system that makes sure that only 1 in 10,000 artists can make money with the question "How will the artists get paid if you remove this system?" It's at that point that you start looking at who, specifically, is asking that question – and discover that it's consistently the obsolete middlemen and the already-rich artists who are asking it, who have a vested interest in not allowing more artists into the moneymaking crowd. Meanwhile, the struggling artists are relying on sites like The Pirate Bay to make money – sites that these gatekeepers therefore desire to banish, to keep control of that entire economy to themselves.

Third, the question is irrelevant in the first place. Today, we can use any digital communications channel for private, confidential correspondence, or we can use it to transmit art that is under copyright monopoly. You cannot discover the latter without also seeing the former – the act of sorting legal from illegal communication requires observation, and so we've come to a point where enforcement of the copyright monopoly has become mutually exclusive with private communications as a concept. As a society, it shouldn't even be a question that the ability to talk in private has greater value than a distribution monopoly for one particular entertainment industry.

The real question is: "Which do you prefer – the ability to hold a private conversation at all, or having the next Transformers movie funded by middlemen exactly the same way such works have been funded for the past quarter-century?" That's the choice to be made, and the copyright industry is doing everything in their power to distract from the fact that this is where the decision lies, because it means the entire industry would be dropped like a bad habit.

Good riddance. Let's focus on the civil liberties the net brings us, and cherish the sharing of art, culture and knowledge. The parasitic commercial middlemen of the copyright industry have no place in the new world. Long live The Pirate Bay!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.