Shared responsibility
The significance of the Pirate Bay’s trial goes far beyond the intellectual property law. Here, on Russian soil, similar processes take off and similar issues are being considered, yet from a somewhat different angle.
A year ago a district court in Stockholm, Sweden, found four owners of The Pirate Bay - an Internet portal which offers thousands of movies, TV shows, or tracks of music for download – of helping to illegally distribute copyrighted material.
The case, praised by intellectual rights lobbyists and lambasted by the Web crowd, brought to light serous legal problems lying at the heart of today’s Internet and may challenge the way we see its future.
The defendants, who have cultivated an image of rebellious outsiders, argued that they were acting legally. The Pirate Bay, they said, does not host copyrighted files but links to pieces of material - known as torrents - hosted elsewhere on the Internet. As such, it does not infringe copyright and the portal is, essentially, no different from Google. It is the users who share material and break the law. And they, not the site owners, should have been punished.
The argument was partially successful and the prosecutors had to drop some of the charges: as a result, the Swedish quartet was found guilty not of stealing, but of helping others to do so.
The verdict, therefore, hinges on the principle of accessory to crime, so that ‘responsibility for assistance can involve someone who has only insignificantly assisted in the principal crime’. From the common sense perspective, the verdict is right and ludicrous at the same time: the one who committed the crime walks free - and probably never will be prosecuted - while those who helped go to jail.
So, who should be targeted: those who share files or those who help the partners in crime find one another?
In February Russian law enforcement agencies expressed interest in a domestic file-sharing service Torrents.ru. RU-Centre, a national domain registrar, at their request discontinued the domain delegation.
‘Our task,’ the police General Victor Vasiliev said, ‘is to curb the activities of the creators of this resource.’ The head of the department of economic crime of the Moscow police Nikolay Nazimok, on the other hand, said that it is the users, and not the site owners, who should be targeted.
Reality, however, can be different. The controversial AllofMp3.com kept winning in domestic courts and was closed not because of a court order but as a result of the administrative pressure.
So far torrent.ru is only benefiting from the attention of the police and the media: it re-opened under a different name and keeps growing, feeding on the scandalous popularity.
March 29, 2010
photo: Fotolian - Fotolia.com
RUSSIA PURGES LOCAL FILE-SHARING NETWORKS OF PIRACY
TEXT: Dr. Evgeny Aleksandrov, Gorodissky & Partners
The recent news about shutting down the most famous Russian file-sharing service ‘torrents.ru’ blew up the Internet. It was the first time that the police had managed to close down such a resource. Although the site has moved to another domain, the authorities are in a position to continue anti-counterfeiting activities on the Internet. The Deputy Chief of the Moscow Police Department Lieutenant General Victor Vasiliev stated that the main goal of the police is to prevent the activity of the owners of such resources. This successful operation demonstrated the readiness and preparedness of the police to fight against piracy in the Internet and efficiently apply their skills in the IT sphere for this purpose.
At the same time, Nikolay Nazimok, Head of the Moscow Department of Economic Crimes observed that in most countries it is the users of such resources rather than the owners who are fought against. Perhaps, such an approach indeed works well in other countries. However, Russian laws do not envisage responsibility for the users for downloading content illegally placed by pirates and nowadays this proposal could hardly be realized without making changes to current legislation.
On the other hand the real reason for the existing level of piracy on the Internet is the absence of an alternative to file-sharing sites for Russian users. There are not many sites where users can download legal content and the choice is usually scant: either buy a legal DVD or CD (which requires a lot of space for storage) or download a pirate copy from the Internet. If Russian users had access to official legal network resources (e.g. Apple Store) where they could download legal content for a reasonable price they would certainly prefer these official sites. It is quite possible that the level of piracy on the Internet would decrease proportionally to the increase of the available legal content.
