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In this area discuss the following: What implications does the conviction of the four cofounders of the Pirate Bay Web site in 2009 have for international attempts to prosecute intellectual property crimes globally?  Should the four men also have been required to stand trial in all of the countries in which copyrighted material had been downloaded from their Web site?   Will the outcome of the Pirate Bay trial likely deter entrepreneurs, worldwide, from setting up future P2P sites that allow the illicit file sharing of copyrighted material?

reply to this:

The successful prosecution of the 4 founders in Sweden was important in that it presented the international community with the clear fact that you could be successfully prosecuted in your home country for a theft of data that originated in a different country.  To give a quick example, let’s use a store copy of Windows 8 that is stolen from a store in Sweden.  Local authorities would prosecute the case there, even though MS is a US company.  There would be no need to fly a thief all the way to America for MS to defend their IP.  Now, say Windows 8 is stolen digitally over a torrent site set up in Sweden.  You have a theft still occurring in the country, but the product itself wasn’t taken locally.  It would not make sense to fly the criminal all the way to the states to prosecute them.  That is an example of what happened to the Pirate Bay founders in their home country.  Other than an occasional special case, it makes sense to try to person in their home country where they downloaded illegal data, and this case shows a lot of people in the international community that is what will happen.  I think we will see a lot less people try to start torrent sites now.  Before they might have thought they were safe if their country didn’t have an extradition treaty with another, or the laws concerning digital piracy in one country didn’t apply in theirs.  It is one thing if people want to share content they own, or that is in the public domain, but protected material that is available for anyone to download without paying for should be protected and I feel this will limit the amount of torrent sites that will spring up.

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