So I gather by now you’ve all heard the terrible news about the guys behind The Pirate Bay torrents search site have been found guilty with lots of help from the US entertainment industry and their lackey trade groups. While everyone and their brother seems to be bemoaning this latest victory – which is pyrrhic at best – by the entertainment I am surprised by two things.

First – who in their right mind didn’t expect this outcome. Come on get your head out of the sand for five minutes and face the fact that the multi-billion dollar might of a global entertainment industry could have shit bricks and they would have still won.

Second – if you think it will stop here or that the decision in anyway will affect the Pirate Bay search business then you are sadly mistaken. The four people behind Pirate Bay have already made it clear that they have planned for this contingency and spread their servers around the world in such away that they are going to be very difficult to shutdown. As well it didn’t matter who won in court this time around because you can be assured that in either case the appeals would have been filed before the ink was dry.

What is interesting is to read all the various hyperbole that has been circulating throughout the tech blogosphere this morning. Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström have been described as being everything from the ones responsible for the world’s most notorious file-sharing site to being money grubbing opportunists who caused the entertainment industry great financial harm.

Ya okay we’ll let you roll with that for a minute or two while Sony Music Industry, Warner Bros., EMI and Columbia Pictures decide how to divvy up the $3.6 million award for damages. The thing is that for all the accusations of Pirate Bay being a file sharer the argument is fundamentally flawed. Pirate Bay as a site does not host any of the files that they are accused of sharing. All they are doing is providing a search engine interface for torrents that point to both legal and illegal content. It’s not like they are twisting anyone’s arm to download anything – they are providing a service not a file depot.

This would be like suggesting that Google or Microsoft Live are file sharers because they provide links to downloadable content. If the grounds that the entertainment industry used against Pirate Bay are valid by even the farthest stretch of the imagination then the same arguments should be used against Google and Microsoft. After all a simple search for Rolling Stones MP3’s on both of those search engines will give you a multitude of download links.

Think not? Then think again

While using torrents actually is more difficult until you get use to downloading them both Google and Microsoft through their respective search engines provide direct links to easily downloadable files. so what is the difference here?

As Paul O’Flaherty pointed out this morning

The entertainment industry is a monolithic conglomeration of companies that would rather litigate than innovate and have proven time and time again that the pursuit of money and protecting their outdated business model is all that matters to them. What better direction to take than to go after those with the deepest pockets? Especially now that they have a precedent ruling against what is essentially just a search engine.

Why is it okay for Microsoft or Google to use the exact same excuse that the guys running Pirate Bay used and yet while they go to jail, Google and Microsoft get a free pass. This story is far from being done but in the meantime everyone talking about this bullshit decision will carry on with misleading information about how these file sharers are getting what they deserve and racking up the pageviews as they go. In the end though there is no difference between them and any other search engine provider – they just made a better target and better press.

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