The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org) was shut down today by the Swedish police. It’s reminiscent of a while back when Suprnova got shut down, except this is gonna be a different kind of battle I think. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out differently from Suprnova, given that Sweden has no laws pertaining to copyright infringement like we do here in the US.
They picked up three TPB operators who are like 22, 24, and 28. I was thinking about how easy it’d be to get yourself lots of intarweb fame, get arrested, and Slashdotted like a mofo by just starting a good BT site in the US. Once you got a decent amount of traffic, you’d probably last like 20 minutes and the FBI would show up and take your boxes and haul you off.
I think it’d be ridiculously scary to operate a site of that magnitude with the kind of stigma that exists associated with BitTorrent, especially on today’s internets. And all this on top of fighting the Net Neutrality debate and the Two-Tier Internet. It’s like fighting a war with people who don’t want to change or want to control everything directly because it’s scary for them. So as a result anything that pushes the envelope gets attacked, raided, or both. That’s just dumb. When are people going to learn that this won’t go away?
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
