The popular defense for The Pirate Bay, along with all other torrent trackers, is that they don’t actually host any of the copyrighted information on their servers (they just facilitate connections between users who have files, and users who want those files), and therefore they are not actually engaging in any criminal activity. Unfortunately, this is much the same as saying that your drug dealer isn’t breaking the law because they’re never actually in possession of the drugs — they merely act as a facilitator between their supplier and you — their customer. The fact of the matter is that when you want to download copyrighted content, (be it a TV show, a movie, or a game) you go to http://thepiratebay.org, and you search for what you want to download. User-generated content or not, it is clear that at the very least the site facilitates your efforts to download copyrighted content.

However, I’m not even sure that the fact that the site isn’t hosting the copyrighted content is even a relevant defense in the context of the internet. Unlike the aforementioned drug dealer, there is no physical product changing hands… just a string of binary digits. There’s no such thing as ownership or possession in the traditional sense of the term when you’re talking about electronic data. Data can be copied or distributed as many times as necessary without any degradation or change in the original product. Furthermore, with things like cloud storage and social networking, often times your information is broken up into thousands of pieces and stored all over the world. The important aspect is not who is storing the data on their physical drives, but rather which site compiles and links you to that data. I have no idea where GMail is storing my individual emails, but Google is the entity responsible for hosting and storing that data. The example might not be so clear cut here, since Google owns all of their data centres, but the same thing can be said for smaller social networking or storage sites like Dropbox, that purchase their storage from a third party. The point remains the same: where the data is stored is largely unimportant to who “owns” it, when talking about the internet.

Prosecutorial incompetence in the current trial aside, it strikes me that a lot of The Pirate Bay’s trial defense rests on their ability to play dumb while ridiculing the prosecution, and trying to escape on several technicalities. It remains to be seen whether the judge sees through this facade, but to everybody who actually engages in piracy, it seems rather obvious what role The Pirate Bay plays.

It turns out that a new movie theater is going into a plaza around Sheppard and Don Mills. This isn’t your average run-of-the mill theater either; this is one of Cineplex’s giant “Silver City” theater complexes. This isn’t an isolated incident either; theaters are still being constructed amidst giant box store malls all over Ontario. While this isn’t necessarily proof that the theater companies aren’t in trouble, it makes me wonder if they’re doing as bad as most people seem to think.