Via Boing Boing:

The four defendants in the Swedish trial of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and $3.6m fine. I don’t know much about Swedish copyright law — and the defense rested on the technical boundaries what constitutes an infringement — so I have no idea if this is the kind of judgment that is likely to survive the inevitable appeal.

A more interesting question is whether The Pirate Bay will disappear now. After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it’s certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course — just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more “moderate” services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).

It’s a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that’s dedicated to their destruction.

Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.

Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.

They were forced to drop the charge of “assisting copyright infringement” and focus on the lesser charge of “assisting making available copyrighted content”. They had been seeking SKr115m (£101m) in compensation for loss of earnings due to the millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site. [link]

Many blogs are flying the (Creative Commons Licensed) Pirate Flag @ half mast today in support of the defendants and fellow pirates. Get yours here.

Apple this week marked a step in the right direction when it comes to the fight against DRM. In an agreement between iTunes and major labels, as of today, 8 million iTunes songs are DRM-free! By March, all 10 million iTunes tracks should be DRM free. This, paired with the discontinuation of the RIAA suing its customers, makes me think that just maybe they are getting the picture – DRM DOES NOT WORK! I did think it was kinda humorous though – Apple is calling DRM-free “iTunes Plus” the “New Standard” on iTunes. It’s been the standard for all tech-saavy music lovers for years – Apple and the record industry is finally getting with the program!!

Thanks Apple! You just got a little less evil! Now, let’s talk video format…