The war against internet piracy continues. Yesterday, I wrote about the French government’s efforts to end illegal downloading by cutting off the IPS and blacklisting the downloader for a year.

Well, today the news broke that Swedish courts have convicted the founders of popular BitTorrent site Pirate Bay for facilitating illegal downloading. The original charge levied by media companies was that founders were engaging in direct copyright infringement, but then lowered that to facilitation given that Pirate Bay only provides a medium of exchange.

The four founders were sentenced to one year in jail and fined $3.6 million; they intend to appeal.

This recent case along with the French government’s efforts illustrate that national governments are getting serious about ending piracy. . .and on the high seas as well.

Due to pressure from the American government, Sweden had already banned Pirate Bay from operating within the country. Needless to say, it just exchanged files outside of Sweden. And even if the EU bans Pirate Bay, it will just find another address to operate from that is outside the remit of the European Union.

Even if the Pirate Bay were put out of business another similar service would be sure to spring up in its place (indeed, others do exist). The Pirate Bay is the latest in a long list of illegal file-sharing services, such as Napster, Grokster and Kazaa, that have sunk under the assault of the media giants. Despite a sustained global legal campaign against such services and against the individuals who are the origin of the illegal files, the popularity of illegal file-sharing has not waned. In January the IFPI, an industry body that co-ordinated this case and others, suggested in a report that 95% of music downloads are unauthorised. The growth in legal sales over the internet is largely powered by new downloaders and illegal file sharers are not changing their ways.

What governments fail to realize here is that all this is just a game of whack-a-mole. If you shut down Pirate Bay, another will pop up. Ban it in Sweden, they will operate from Senegal if need be. Governments are trying to cure the symptom rather than the cause of piracy. Piracy can only be dealt with if there is a global effort, or at least it will be dealt a serve blow if the United States adopted a method similar to France.

Source: Online pirates at bay.