thought the tweet was funny: @brokep [Pirate Bay founder] Really, it's a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.

Correction: The U.S. now enjoys free content on hulu and other sites.

If the appeal is upheld and they really do have to pay $3.6m in fines, I don't think they would have much difficulty raising it online. I'd be up for a C-note no problem and I don't doubt there are plenty of others, especially if they throw in a special edition t-shirt or something.

The Pirate Bay website is pretty awful but they're a tremendously important tracker, used by many others. There is a genuine need for such a service. I'm not exactly a l33t w4r3z d00d but I greatly appreciate what these guys have done, and while I have some questions about the workability of their principles on filesharing I greatly respect their integrity in walking the walk. They're no mere pirates, they started a political party for fuck's sake, and the movies they made may suck but they gave them away just as they promised. I got a lot of respect for those guys and will gladly put my money where my mouth is.

Good luck to them and may the Pirate Bay reach ever new heights!

> ... without added value.

I think this allegation betokens a certain ignorance of how the music industry works. Firstly, producers, recording engineers and assistants, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers certainly do add value -- where "value" is defined in the narrow artistic sense. These roles are certainly part of the "Phonographic Industry".

In addition, just because record labels, promoters, publishers, managers, and agents, etc. don't "create" music doesn't mean they don't add value. When they do their job well -- which, granted, is not always the case -- they allow the artist(s) to focus solely on the music, rather than on tasks which they're not particularly suited to, like organizing international, multi-leg tours, getting ads on billboards, doing distribution deals with the likes of iTunes, Spotify, and the traditional music retailers, plugging artists' music into commercial radio stations. Record labels also act as a quasi insurance policy for artists; by using a portion of the revenue streams from "hit" and established artists, they can finance new acts. There is certainly value to that. Jazz music was, after all, only a niche art form known to very few before Norman Granz's efforts to popularize it. In this sense, while he was certainly no Miles Davis or Bird, his work had an immense impact on generations of listeners. (I'd add that in an age of segregation and prejudice against blacks, he stuck his neck out to sign them, and insisted on equal pay for all colours and genders -- see wikipedia) Again: no value?

I find it curious that the tech-savvy world of Hacker News, which should be comfortable with the idea of specialization in modern capitalist economies, seems to pine for a return to a "cottage" music industry, where the musician is to perform all of the afore-mentioned roles himself. Am I alone in thinking this would be a step back, rather than forward?

Sadly, in order for this system to work, people need to pay for records (but obviously, they should be much cheaper than in the heady 90s days). I therefore applaud the Swedish courts for upholding the rule of law and holding the facilitators of rampant piracy accountable for their actions -- which have, unquestionably, led to much misery for many low-level, up-and-coming musicians (myself included ;)

Thanks to these guys and ones prior to them (ShareReactor) we now enjoy free content on Hulu and other sites!

I no longer use Bit Torrent, but do thank these guys for forcing old media's hand!

Summary: Everyone received 1 year in prison. They plan to appeal, which means the final verdict could take years. The website and tracker are staying up.

Debt collectors are a reasonable approach, but take one more step before you do that.

1) find a lawyer who you can hire for an hour or two for $200-$400. You're paying for his letterhead, not his skills.

2) Get him to write a letter saying "you have 14 days to pay 2/3 of the amount. If we receive that, the debt is discharged in full. IF we don't receive that by 14 days from today, we're going to court, and we're asking for the full amount of the debt, lawyer fees, and damages. Please pay now."

I've collected LOTS of debts in my time, 95% successfully.

This technique works.

a2enmod deflate

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Peter Sunde said:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”

Perhaps they should add RubySpec then come back with those numbers. IIRC, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 assertions in there and growing everyday.

Unlike Perl, Ruby has elected to make these specs an open community process usable across all implementations. Oops.