Pirates to be strung up! (but probably not)

gibbetBeing many, many timezones away from Stockholm (and having been woefully behind in blogging in general) makes anything I have to say about the guilty verdict for the Piratebay admins rather old news, but I will just reiterate my previous prediction that nothing substantive will change in the P2P or filesharing world. Most likely appeals will prevent any change from affecting Piratebay itself for quite some time, but even if that proves mistaken, there is roughly zero chance that if the Piratebay disappears it would reduce the amount of Bittorrent traffic worldwide, much less decrease the amount of copyright infringement that occurs on the Internet.  Just as with previous rightsholder victories (Napster, Suprnova, Isotorrent, etc.) there will likely be evolution in the way people share files, making whatever the next mainstream avenue of piracy (usenet, directdownload, etc.) that much harder for enforcement to have any real impact.

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