This is sad.

The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict – Guilty
(enigmax, Torrent Freak, 17 Apr 2009)

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. All receive 1 year in jail.

…

The court said that the four defendants worked as a team, were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements.

While the court did not agree with the plaintiff’s estimates of losses (around $12m), it still set the damages at 30 million SEK ($3,620,000). This a hugely significant amount and the court has ordered that the four should pay this amount between them.

Peter Sunde has already explained that this decision does not mean the end of the line in this case. There will be an appeal which means we are still far away from the ultimate decision – possibly years away.

As for the fate of the site, Peter has already promised that The Pirate Bay will continue. The site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals listed above.

It certainly seemed from the coverage of the trial itself that the defense had made a better case, but of course I’m not actually fully versed in any law, let alone Swedish law. Therefore I won’t speak at all toward if this was a “correct” decision. But any policy or law that makes what the Pirate Bay does illegal is bad policy or law. If this is upheld after the appeals, and if trends toward strict copyright laws continue, then I predict there will be a significant backlash as soon as the generations currently aged 25 and under who grew up with the internet and with file sharing as a normal part of life start reaching positions of power… perhaps before then.

Using the law as a ham fisted way to maintain and support outdated business and economic models that stifle innovation and the free flow of things with a near zero marginal cost of reproduction (basically any text, images, audio or video at the moment, and probably more things in the future) may be a tactic that works in the short term, but in the long run it is a losing proposition.

Quite simply, in good old fashioned supply and demand curve terms the ease of reproduction makes the supply essentially infinite which of necessity should drop the price to essentially zero. Using the government to make the reproduction illegal and/or difficult is simply artificially constraining supply to try to prop up the price… at a potentially huge overall cost to the efficiency of the system, which ultimately will be unsustainable.

Anyway. Sad day.