Case

1. Do you think The Pirate Bay can cotinue to survive in a global Internet world? Why or why not?

The global Internet world is changing rapidly, therefore the environment of the 2003 established The Pirate Bay site and other pirate sites changes evenly fast. As The Pirate Bay works as a connector between people searching files and other platforms offering them, they served a need of people wanting to get free of cost access to such files while meanwhile creating revenue from online-advertising. At that time the Internet was not as regulated as it is nowadays. Now, Governments placed higher regulations on such platforms and on people participating in pirate sites activities. Also, lawsuites were set that do not allow servers to interlink with pirate sites or host such pages. As a reaction to that, The Pirate Bay started hiding their servers as well as changes its IP address frequently. As a result of stricter regulations in Sweden, the host country of The Pirates Bay, the internet traffic decreased rapidly.

In addition to rules and regulation, the environment The Pirates Bay functions in changed as well. New streaming services appeared that offer good quality content for only small charges and on a legal basis. Quality on „conventional“ pirate sites has always been an issue. Considering the fact that content quality, especially in the area of movie and films, is increasing rapidly and people become more adapted to good quality film material, the pirated offers may struggel to keep up with new services.

Considering these mayor two aspects, legal issues on one side and low-cost legal and good quality streaming services on the other side it seems questionable wether The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites will still be of high importance of tomorrows internet world.

1. Why is legislation like the Protect IP Act opposed by Google and civil liberties gourps?

The protect IP Act is opposed by Google and other civil liberties groups because it interferes with internets‘ fundamentals - a free interchange of content and ideas. Now, government can interfere users search requests and/ or redirect search resulsts. Also websites can be censored. Civil liberties group fear that governmental interference may lead to high censorship or other forms of internet control totalitarian governments already use nowadays. The question hereby is where does governmental control end and where does it lead to in the future?

Another aspect that needs to be mentioned is that search engines like Google may loose high value customers, as websites can be put on blacklists and will therefore no longer appear within the search engines results.

Overall, monetary issues, as well as issues concerning civil rights both lead to opposition of the Pretect IP Act.

1. Why does cloud computing threaten pirate sites?

Existing pirate sites often offer linkages to content or they offer content themselves. Cloud computing provides a new form on how content can be stored and shared for various types of end devices. Cloud computing exists in various forms (reaching from a public cloud, community to a private cloud). Also, in comparison to The Pirate Bay and many other pirate sites, it is not revenue driven. Depending on the form of cloud, the users given access to data can be selected more carefully. Content stored within the cloud could still be subject to copyright, but governments might not be able to access and hunt down the cloud providers as they are on pirate sites due to higher security protection of the cloud.