Many people believed that this major part of Internet file sharing life would never die, due to Sweden's unwavering stance on .torrent trackers, but that has now changed.

The Swedish Police performed a raid upon the Private property of The Pirate Bay, and their sympathetic information-freedom supporting political party, The Pirate Party, trashing freedom of speech and performing what has been condemned as an immature act, under the vast pressure of the over-fed media corporations of this world by sending 50 police and arresting two PirateBay.org personnel, even though under Swedish law, what The Pirate Bay does is not illegal, although it is hated by some of the largest media corporations in the world, who, not content with ripping of their artists, are now hunting down their fans in droves.

The Pirate Bay tracks and gives out ".torrent" files, a type of file that is used by people on the net to cheaply distribute files and data, by utilising the computer of the person downloading the file to send the parts of the file that are on that machine to send to others wishing to get the data, cutting distribution costs for independent film makers, book producers, news reporters and musicians alike. While some of the information is copy written material, there is a lot that is not, and the small mama and papa groups on the web are the ones that will suffer the most out of this, as the illegal users can always get their .torrent files from somewhere else.

The media industry has been struggling to cope with the new influx of distribution methods available for use, and rather than picking them up, the likes of Sony, and BMG, along with many others, have formed a coalition against these new technology's, attempting to stop all usage of them and blaming them for their massive loss of sales, pushing for file sharing convictions all over the world, mainly in the US and UK (where statistically, in the UK, there are less file sharers than ever before, yet STILL there are dwindling sales figures). In these Court cases, they have been charging children for these 'crimes' of sharing data, charging massive amounts per song, and even suggesting in the US that a teenager give up his collage education to pay off the fine for sharing what is essentially 0's and 1's.

the basis of their entire argument is that they deserve to be paid £15 for a piece of plastic that cost £0.05 at most to produce, while a woman out in India DESERVES £0.02 a day for picking out tea leaves that sell for far more than £0.02. Do they deserve that?

links

 http://www2.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/the_pirate_bay_and_piratbyran_taken_down_by_police#english ---- ofitial site info
 http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1203 ---- news site coverage