Here's the thing with the Pirate Bay:<p>They don't care what the courts say or think. They've had founders get in trouble before, the site kept going. The servers were seized, the site kept going.<p>And after this... well the site will still keep going. That will never stop. People will always keep running torrent sites, and there will likely always be people from The Pirate Bay who'd set up their own version/fork/whatever the second it goes down.<p>In other words, this court ruling will mean nothing for it. They didn't care before, and they probably won't care now either.
Wasn't this to be expected, though? I'm no way near being a lawyer but, as I understand it, intent is quite important in law. If you design something with the intent of breaking a law, it makes sense that you should be liable.<p>That being said, I'm no supporter of copyright law, and I think whoever depends on owning information to generate an income will have a very limited life span (decades, at most), since they're essentially fighting against technology. The Pirate Bay is <i>extremely</i> simple technology (web page+BitTorrent), and after a decade of fighting I can still access it because I don't use my ISP's DNS servers -- just imagine how long the next innovation will take to suppress in court.
"Pirate Bay may finally be sunk after EU copyright ruling" -- As if we hadn't heard that a few times before. This ruling opens the doorway for blocking but if history is any evidence, it will 1) take some time before this turns into real blocks and, 2) technology will adjust accordingly.
This link appears to be dead and redirects to <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06</a>. Can anyone suggest a replacement?
I can buy VHS tapes at Goodwill for $.49 a movie. Oddly enough, this price being essentially free, means that my time spent watching the movie is the real price. I wind up not watching them because they are not worth my time.
A colleague watches everything with Thai subtitles. This works great as his girlfriend is Thai. By everything I mean everything. Pirate Bay is hard work by comparison, as is a real DVD. I think that the warez game has moved on for serious movie watchers.