Pirate Bay Founders Sentenced To 1 Year In Jail

The 4 founders of The Pirate Bay, the high profile file-sharing site, have each been found guilty of breaking copyright law by a court in Sweden. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were all sentenced to one year in prison for their part in the crime.

After the decision Mr. Sunde tweeted: "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media."

"got the news last night that we lost".

"It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

BBC story here.

Mygazines.com = Piratre Bay For Magazines

Here is a site that is in the news a lot this morning... Mygazines.com launched in late July and encourages users, of which it has more than 16,000 at the moment, to "upload. share. archive." high quality digital scans of magazines that they've purchased. Of course you have to think copyright infringement the moment you open the site, but the problem for North American magazine publishers is Mygazines is registered in the Caribbean and hosted in Sweden, by the Stockholm-based PRQ which is owned by the founders of Pirate Bay. Tracking down those responsible or even putting preasure on the domain registrar or site host is nearly impossible.

With a quick search of the site I turned up the August edition of Wired that I just paid $5.99 plus tax for... but then again if I didn't buy it I wouldn't be able to build upon my Wired Art Collection, and besides, if we frequent Mygazines.com or other such sites we put the publishers at risk and threaten the very content that we enjoy.

Nine Inch Nails In The Coffins Of The Record Labels?

On the heals of an arguably successful "pay what you want" music download campaign by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails is leveraging BitTorrent sites and releasing songs under a Creative Commons license that permits purchasers to remix the tracks, according to a recent Wired article. The bands latest offering is Ghosts I-IV, contains 36 songs and split into four volumes. The first volume was uploaded to Pirate Bay by band leader Trent Reznor (and/or his representatives) where it can be downloaded for free. The entire 36-song version can be purchased digitally in MP3 format for $5 from Amazon MP3 or the Nine Inch Nails website, NIN.com. The move is possible because the band is no longer tied to a label and it has allowed them to get creative with how they sell and market their music. Besides the $5 downloads NIN are offering other packages such as a now sold out $300 "ultra-deluxe" limited-edition package (2,500 copies) that included four 180-gram records each numbered and signed by Reznor. Just wait until other contracts start to expire, it's probably not a good time to be holding shares in record labels.