While he might not be a driving force behind The Pirate Bay anymore that doesn’t mean that Peter Sunde has stopped being interested in the principles that were used to found the famous torrent site, or that he doesn’t still have strong opinions about the entertainment industry and how they are a massively corrupting influence of the Web.
In a post today over at TorrentFreak he has some rather interesting things to say about the current state of affairs following the recent court decision by a UK High Court that the Pirate Bay was guilty of enabling people to be able to download copyrighted media and that they can be block from the UK at the ISP level.
As a side note Sunde points out that the fact that this case in particular ended up in front of the High Court instead of more proper court channels is something that should be questioned which alludes to questions of whether the case has some extra help to get it fast tracked.
But the main thrust of Sunde’s post was reserved for the entertainment industry and how it, like the Mafia, is looking to try and force the telcos into a position where it will be cheaper for them to pay “protection” money instead of fighting every single “infringement case” in the courts but to do this the entertainment industry needs to be put in the position where it is the “police” of the Internet and therefor liable for what passes through their pipes.
The ISPs are usually big corporations, the telco industry is in fact much bigger than the entertainment industry. They’re operating on a global scale with billions of customers. This means that they have lots of money as well as lots of potential customers for the entertainment industry. If the telcos could be held liable for any sort of infringement, and have to police the Internet, there would only be two possible ways to do so.
One would be to shut down their business since it’s impossible to make sure that nothing illegal goes on in your network. The second option is to strike a deal with the entertainment industry.
Just as with any other mafia, the entertainment industry wants protection money. To avoid lawsuits the telcos would have to pay. Either by forcing them to re-sell a service the entertainment industry control (like Spotify) or by charging them a set fee for each connection per month.
Just a different viewpoint for you to consider but given Peter Sunde’s reputation and background it might have some serious validity.
