Google is the New Pirate Bay

In my last post, regarding the conviction of four Swedes for maintaining a website which indexed torrents, I tossed off the comment that Google could be accused of the same thing.

Three days later, Mashable backs me up with this:

One of the claims from those defending and supporting The Pirate Bay in the recent trial (but also other similar sites), is that the entertainment industry is suing something that’s not much different from a search engine. Using Google’s Custom Search Engine, someone has created a Google based torrent search engine.

The idea is not by any means new; you could do this before by using certain types of queries (simply adding “filetype:torrent” to your query works), but it’s a nice time to spotlight the fact that yes, you don’t really need sites like Mininova or The Pirate Bay to find torrents; you can simply use Google which crawls thousands of torrent tracker sites, big and small, and get direct links to torrents. Want a screener of current hit, X-Men origins – Wolverine? Use this Google query and you’ve got it.

Is Google, then, the next in line to be sued for copyright infringement, or assisting in making copyright content available? If it weren’t too big to be sued, it probably would be.

So the Swedes didn’t do anything Google isn’t doing. Their real crimes? First: being honest about it. Second: being cocky, and giving the finger to the recording and motion picture industries. Third: being small and weak enough to be a target.

Yes, the entertainment industry is losing money to file sharing. Not as much as they claim, but some unquantifiable amount. To respond to the problem by having people thrown in jail is only to make them even more hateable, and further remove any remaining moral clarity from the question of whether to “steal” from them. And they only make matters worse by using file sharing as an all-encompassing excuse for their own sins – such as the undeniably low quality of their products year after year, price-gouging, ripping off the artists who supply their wares, cartel-style collusion, manipulating the public into repeatedly buying the same product…to name just a few. 

Most people have already rendered their verdict. The entertainment industry has been judged guilty, and now they’re paying the damages.

Swedish Pirates Convicted

As we covered March 5th in “Swedish Pirates on Trial“, today was verdict day for The Pirate Bay Four. The four defendants were accused of “assisting in making copyright content available”. This morning the verdict was returned.

Peter Sunde: Guilty
Fredrik Neij: Guilty.
Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty.
Carl Lundström: Guilty.
Each received 1 year in jail and $905,000 each in damages.

All four will appeal the decision.

The court said that the four were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as “severe”. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this.

Roger Wallis, who spoke in favor of The Pirate Bay at the trial, noted “This will cause a flood of court cases. Against all the ISPs. Because if these guys assisted in copyright infringements, then the ISPs also did. This will have huge consequences. The entire development of broadband may be stalled.”

Editorial note: you can find the same torrents in many other places, including Google. Presumably employees of Google will now be subject to fines in Sweden for torrents they list. Presumably the Swedes will also hold Google responsible when it lists pages containing libelous content, bomb-making instructions, hate speech, etc. etc.

The bottom line: this was a political prosecution, backed by powerful interests. It will be appealed, and hopefully higher courts will hold themselves to a higher standard – a legal standard perhaps. The Pirates are not perfect, but in this case they are right.

Facebook Makes You Stupid, Twitter Makes You Dead Inside

…or so say researchers, according to this article from The Register:

Fresh research from America confirms that online social networks are in fact playthings of the devil. Ohio profs say that use of Facebook leads to lower college grades, and others in California have found that Twitter gradually renders its users’ moral compasses untrustworthy.

First up comes Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State Uni, with the news that Facebook users (at least those in her survey) are lazy, self-deluding thickies.

“There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying,” says Karpinski.

The PhD candidate collaborated with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican Uni, surveying 219 students at Ohio State. These included 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account. Some 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.

The Facebook users had grade point averages (GPAs) between 3.0 and 3.5 (in other words getting more Bs than As), while non-users averaged between 3.5 and 4.0 (more As than Bs)*.

Also, “students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook,” according to Ohio State.

“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” adds Karpinski, who doesn’t have a Facebook account herself.

“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have suggested that too much use “rapid-fire media” – specifically, Twitter – “may confuse your moral compass”.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention,” says Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC.

It seems that USC neuro-boffins hooked people up to brain monitoring gear and measured their responses to stories told in different ways about different subjects.

According to the USC statement:

The study raises questions about the emotional cost — particularly for the developing brain — of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, prof at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

The USC researchers seem to suggest that learning things mainly through a constant stream of short, depersonalised info-nuggs will restrict a person’s ability to empathise with the people in the stories being told – to admire them, feel their pain or whatever.

Essentially, over-heavy Twitter use will make you cold, cynical and facile – ultimately leaving you heartless and dead inside.

“Indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in,” says Castells.

There’s more from Ohio on Facebook making you thick/appealing primarily to lazy thickies here, and from California on Twitter making you dead inside/appealing primarily to the facile and amoral here.