The Pirates be Slain

One of the biggest file sharing, peer to peer sites known as the Pirate Bay seems to be in trouble. Last year in Stockholm (Sweden), a case was filed against Pirate Bay through its owners/ founders for "assisting copyright infringement"; however, this charge was dropped since the prosecutor could not get a conviction as no infringing material could be found on the servers of The Pirate Bay. The site doesn't actually host copyrighted files; it only permits its users to post links to any material hosted on third-party servers. The Prosecutors ended up pursuing only a charge of "assisting in making available copyrighted material". The owners of the site were found guilty and sentenced to a year imprisonment and an amount of 30 million Swedish kronor (US$3.6 million) in damages.

The controllers of the site contended that since no copyrighted material is stored on its servers and no exchange of files actually takes place there, they cannot be held responsible for what material is being exchanged.

The prosecution put forth that by reason of the owners/ founders of Pirate Bay financing, programming and administering the site, they promoted the infringement of property rights by the site's users.

The Pirate Bay case is quite similar to the Napster case, in which Napster an online music file sharing service was sued by A&M records for contributory and vicarious infringement and eventually forced to shut down. For more information on the Napster case please click here..

The Stakes are changing

At its peak, according to Napster vice-president Don Dodge, the network had more than 50 million registered users. It is claimed that approximately 1.6 million users simultaneously used Napster & that Pirate Bay alone has some 10 million users using its network at one time.

The Commissioner will grant such a registration within a period of 30 days from the date of such request which will be valid for one year. Such an intellectual property right will be stored in electronic databases which will be available to all custom authorities across the country across airports and sea ports.

Evolution:

After the fall of Napster many file sharing technologies came into being like Limewire, Kazza, Bearshare, Ares, Bitorrent. It was not the death of file sharing but its development into more complex and faster versions. Is the conviction of Pirate Bay going to bring an end to file sharing? The Pirate Bay is soon to come out with new technology called IPREDATOR service, this service promises to make global Internet users more anonymous than with existing VPN (virtual private network) services.

What About Search Engines and Video Uploading Platforms?

The conviction of Pirate Bay raises the inevitable question; are search engines like Google and yahoo who offer links to sites who allow users to download infringing material ‘assisting in making available copyrighted material’ - a charge for which the owners of Pirate Bay were sentenced to imprisonment and heavy financial damages?

Marco Pancino, Google's European policy counsel in a blog post says, "To meet the needs of holders of intellectual property rights, Google has designed a set of procedures for reporting and removing the content on its search engine of copyright infringement." He further adds that Google is like a highway and cannot be held responsible for the conduct of bad drivers.

Now it might be contended that Pirate Bay too was like a highway with bad drivers, and that not all torrents downloaded from the network were infringing copyrights. However the lesson learned from the Napster fiasco has to be that a network should be diligent in checking to see if its users are infringing the copyrights of others, since Google does that it should be safe from similar prosecution.

The question of Youtube and similar sites remains. Youtube site does not verify if a video is infringing some one’s copyright or not. It merely allows its users to post them. It does not publish but merely acts as a platform for millions of self-publishers, whether they are original or not, creators or counterfeiters. It can thus be contended that Pirate Bay never published infringing material either, but merely got two parties who wanted to share files together.

Indian Scenario

Though in India, infringement of a copyright is an offence, the ‘assisting’ or the abetment of the same is not expressly provided for in the Copyright Act, 1957. However the Indian Penal Code provides under Section 109 that :

Whoever abets any offence shall, if the act abetted is committed in consequence of the abetment, and no express provision is made by this Code for the punishment of such abetment, be punished with the punishment provided for the offence.

Explanation: An act or offence is said to be committed in consequence of abetment, when it is committed in consequence of the instigation or in pursuance of the conspiracy, or with the aid, which constitutes the abetment.

Thus even in India the punishment for abetting copyright infringement would carry the same penalty as that of copyright infringement.