Pirate Bay gets political, could soon be obsolete

Peter Sunde, one of the founders and spokesperson for bitorrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay, is said to have found out that they had lost their court case in Sweden several hours before the official verdict was delivered thanks to information supposedly leaked by what is claimed to be a "trustworthy source".

The Swedish Courts are unimpressed and brought in the police to investigate. Regardless of the final outcome after the dust has cleared from any remaining legal wrangles, The Pirate Bay verdict appears to be achieving the opposite to the outcome intended by the copyright advocates with support for the site and its political offshoot, the Pirate Party reportedly going from strength to strength.

Since the verdict, support for the Swedish Pirate Party has surpassed that of the Swedish Green Party and it now appears that almost half of all Swedish males under the age of 30 are considering voting for the Pirate Party in the 2009 European Parliament elections. In the first 24 hours since the verdict, over 3000 people joined the Pirate Party, raising its membership from under 15,000 to over 18,000, making it the 5th largest, and the most popular political party within the youth demographic. The Pirate Party will however require at least 100,000 votes to gain a seat in the European Parliament.

Politics aside, future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bitorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler. Where the current crop of bittorrent filesharing applications need to be pointed at torrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay to find files, Tribler's searches are done over the networks of fellow bittorrent users, sidestepping centralised torrent tracking sites altogether.

With iPredator about to launch, downloaders will be easily able to anonymously continue their activities whilst Tribler will leave no centralised point of vulnerability for the prosecution and policing of copyright infringers. Both Tribler and the iPredator service are merely the opening salvos fired in a technological arms race. The ball is now firmly in the court of slow moving regulators who will need to step up the development of countermeasures if they intend to make in-roads into enforcing copyright infringement.

* Disclaimer: Although Pat Pilcher Works for Telecom, his opinions do not represent those of his employer.