Jail sentence for Pirate Bay owners

For most people who use file sharing systems like BitTorrent, it's a normal everyday activity. Want to watch a DVD? Type the name of the film into Pirate Bay, click a link and a few hours later the video is waiting for you on your hard drive. It's simple and easy and much nicer than going out in the rain to a video shop. There's no risk, no mystery, no danger. It doesn't happen in a dark alleyway. If you're looking for outlaw thrills, stick to small-time shoplifting or library book fraud.

For these people, the news that the people behind Pirate Bay have been sentenced to prison for a year is simply baffling. It's a small breakdown in reality, like getting a gas bill with a dozen extra noughts on the end. Because it doesn't seem real, it cannot act as a deterrent. Fear of prosecution for an average file sharer is no greater than fear of an asteroid strike.

In the copyright war between Hollywood studios and internet file-sharers, there is no common language or understanding. Aside from Pirate Bay's posturing, most file sharers don't feel like outlaws. They're not copying films or albums or TV shows because they want to be criminal, but because it's often the easiest way to get these things online. The greatest threat to online piracy in the last decade hasn't been legal action or public education campaigns. It was the success of iTunes, because it presented a practical, well-designed alternative to Napster or BitTorrent. Still, if you download an album using BitTorrent, you can do what you like with it. The same album bought from iTunes comes with a complicated set of regulations about how it can be played and copied.

The moral case behind anti-piracy measures is unanswerable: creative people, and the industries that surround them, should be rewarded. When a DVD or album is illegally downloaded, it's sucking money out of that reward pot. It's not really going anywhere else. While a big site like Pirate Bay makes some profit from advertising, their profits are tiny compared with the lost earnings of the studios.

But there seems little chance that the Pirate Bay verdict will change that. The site is still running on servers around the world, with 20 million active users. It's never been the biggest or most widely used BitTorrent site, it's just the most loud-mouthed. If the music and film industries are planning to fight the file sharers through the courts, this will be a long, long war.

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