The Pirate Bay lost it's court battle Friday, and while I don't have much to say about this case in particular, I do take serious issue with copyright holders attacking technology.
Sites like The Pirate Bay, obviously, are kind of asking for it. The problem that I have is when technology is attacked as a byproduct of cleaning up piracy. Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are good examples. None of these technologies host(ed) copyrighted material. All of these technologies have the ability to be used in a perfectly legal manner.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allows users to keep one "backup" of copyrighted material. This means if I own a Rush CD (I legally own every Rush album and DVD), it would be legal for me to download any Rush album. If I have a friend who legally owns that same album, it would be legal for me to transfer a copy to that friend. I am not certain how legal it is or is not for me to provide that content to any random person on the network (I have never shared any Rush album publicly). I presume it is illegal. The DMCA may cover that, but I have not read the entire document, it's long.
If we start requiring web sites to monitor every byte of data, we face a bit of hypocrisy. We don't attempt to monitor much of what is transferred over our highways. The transfer of information over a network is very similar to the transfer of goods over a roadway. If we sue every site that doesn't scrutinize the data it let's users transfer, then couldn't we sue the government for not scrutinizing every car or truck that could be carrying drugs, illegal weapons, or known criminals over their roadways?
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