Sweden is finally charging The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement. Not that I wanted that to happen, but it was bound to happen sometime. This case is interesting, as we are about to find out if they are actually doing anything illegal or not, but more importantly we will hopefully find out “how illegal a search engine is allowed to be”. But does it matter?

One of the main comparisons that people often make is this: The Pirate Bay (TPB) is basically just a search engine that makes money on advertising just like Google. The difference is that TPB primarily (mostly) indexes copyrighted content. If TPB is shut down, Google should be shut down as well, as you are also able to find copyrighted using Google. This is indeed a relevant comparison but will of course not be enough to save them in court. But we should be able to establish an important precedent from the case: How much of your indexed content can be to copyrighted material? 10%? 50%?

It doesn’t matter! We just need the court to say how much is needed not to be considered illegal. Then TPB and all the other torrent trackers can adjust to this and we can all get on with our daily lives… But why stop there? Laws are different across the world, so just to be sure, why don’t trackers just turn into regular search engines? Index a lot of stuff, let it show up in the search results and you can be considered a search engine… Just allow us to include torrent in the search terms or even better: Just have someone create a Greasemonkey script (or something like that) and you’re good to go! The record companies can’t win this fight…

What about the content? Will someone please think of the artists!? That’s a problem with many solutions, but the right ones have not been presented yet. For me, it would be a subscription service at a fair price with no DRM. And you, record labels, have to come up with a solution, because there is always away around any copy protection scheme – it is likely that your DRM can be cracked like has happened so many times. If not, there’s always a way around it, since we humans aren’t digital and require the content to be presented to us in analog form…