Tech Stream

File sharing update

6 May 2009

Reuters is reporting that a recent poll shows the Swedish Pirate Party has enough support to win a seat in the European parliament.   The party, which has no official ties to the file-sharing website Pirate Bay, wants to “deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and a decrease the level of surveillance of the Internet”.  We speculated on their chances in an earlier Tech Stream program, but I remain skeptical that they will get the numbers in the upcoming vote.  Imagine the feathers ruffled if they do get up!

Last week The Guardian (among others) reported that the lawyers defending the four men behind Pirate Bay had applied for a retrial, after it came out that the presiding judge, Tomas Norstrom, was a member of various copyright protection trade bodies in Sweden.  And Ars Technica today makes an interesting observation that Google’s search algorithm is proposing links to .torrent files when TV shows are searched for.  The Pirate Bay founders had argued (unsuccessfully) that their service was no different to Google’s and it will be interesting to see how the world’s largest search engine responds to the results.

Finally, IT journalist Patrick Gray offered his opinion and analysis of the future of peer-to-peer file sharing at ABC online on Monday. It is worth a read, and has stirred some interesting debates at the bottom. Unfortunately the comments on the story have closed.