Today the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial will fall, comments on the verdict will be announced on a digital streamed Press conference at the Pirate Bay site on Friday the 17th of April some minutes before 13.00 CEST (12pm GMT). The verdict would not mean much for the actual torrent tracker sites but, they will live on, but for the people behind Pirate Bay it could mean that they risk being in debt for the rest of their lives.
The author Paulo Coelho is giving his support to Pirate Bay, he has even said: “I am openly supporting their site. I even volunteered to travel to Sweden to discuss the case of open contents, but I never got a reply from them,” [TorrentFreak.com].
New generations are used to share and distribute music online. Given the fact that we have fewer and fewer record shops where we could buy music, and very poor amount of titles in stock in their catalogues it's obvious that the recording industry/record industry has failed to distribute music digitally in record shops online, one of the few exceptions is iTunes, earning a huge amount of money and giving the artists the money they deserve for their artistic work.
Why sites like Pirate Bay and other big tracking sites is succeding is that they could offer a wide variety of music and films, something for every taste, you have to have in mind that not everybody likes Britney Spears, mainstream pop and rock. etc.
A lot of those people genuinely interested in music, like myself, buy music in record shops, mostly online, having more well stocked catalogues, Shadowland (Storgata, Oslo) and Staalplaat (Berlin) or Second Hand boutiques in the physical world.
Those artists not having a major record deal, not having a huge distribution network behind them see the sharing culture online as a nice asset and way of promoting their music in a cheap and easy way. They go from the status of being unknown to beginning to get recognized.
The big recording companies is unhealthy businesses pumping out crap music not worth listening to. Why are they entitled to call what they make culture and art, it's music for the corrupted masses, teenagers with no ideas and thoughts of their own is tempted to buy the music because of heavy commercials promoting the music in every channel available.
The big recording companies is paying to get their artists to be reviewed and mentioned in newspapers etc. Who is standing up for the independent artists, those worth mentioning with an artistic integrity?
I have reviewed music for more than 10 years but the commercialist aspect of the music industry sickens me.
The Pirate Bay trial and outcome is important. Finally we get a "healthy" debate about the distribution of music.
I am not taking sides in the torrent tracker debate but think it's healthy to get a new and fresh start on how to distribute and share music. We have to face the fact that we have something called the internet with a waste amount of oppertunities.
Pirate Bay is just one of many distributors of copyright material. What about:
YouTube
Metacafe
Mininova
Vuze
Seeqpod
Spotify
Streaming independent radio in general
Etc.
Or those programs (clients) making it possible to use the torrent tracking technology:
Bitcomet
Bitlord
Or built in torrent tracking in the Linux UBUNTU, Fedora OS distros like Transmission, Ktorrent etc.
It's really a complex picture with no easy solutions, putting 4 guys in jail won't silence the ongoing debate.
