Nice Analysis of Complexities of Online Piracy

Financial Times:

In April, when a Swedish court sentenced the founders of Pirate Bay to one-year prison terms for promoting copyright infringement on the world's largest filesharing website, the music and film industries gave a standing ovation. But their triumph was short-lived.

The four men, who "tweeted" vigorously on Twitter during their trial, may not be able to communicate so freely from their prison cells. But their struggle for internet freedoms has developed into a political issue: Sweden's Pirate party , dedicated to the legalisation of file-sharing, won a seat last month in the European parliament.

The war being waged by the entertainment industry against online piracy was further weakened when its powerful ally and champion of internet policing, Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, had his anti-piracy bill watered down by his country's highest court in April.

Ten years after the launch of Napster, the first online file-sharing service, the music industry is no closer to solving the problems created by digital piracy. As advances in technology make television, film and video games companies more vulnerable to piracy, that decade-long failure to change consumer behaviour threatens to undermine business models across the media industry.

Piracy has helped to create momentum around legal and intellectual challenges to copyright law. "Piracy has gone from being a simple argument about infringement or using something without permission to questioning the very basis of copyright," says Gregor Pryor, a digital media partner at Reed Smith, the international law firm.

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