A Swedish court Friday found the four founders of The Pirate Bay website guilty of promoting copyright infringement for running a website , one of the world’s top websites for peer to peer filesharing, and sentenced them to a year in prison. The court also ordered the four (Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstroem) to pay damages totaling more than $3 million dollars.
“The Stockholm district court has today convicted the four people charged with promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws,” was said in a statement.
Copyright with respect to a performance recorded as a video, or a movie, or a song is a sham, it does not exist in reality no matter how badly the establishment want it to exist.
The purpose of copyright is to give the author of a written work the ability to earn a living copying his or her own work. BUT, (and this is important) there must be a tangible “original” as in a book and the copies must be tangible. The reason for this is because the ancient laws of ownership handed down to us apply.
If I have a book, I own it, I can sell it, or lend it or make copies of it for my own use. What I may not do is sell those copies because the profit on the copies belongs to the copyright holder. This notion does NOT translate into *performances* which have no tangible existence and exist only in the mind as virtual concepts. This includes Movies, Videos, Audio recordings, etc. There is no tangible original, no physical thing that was created by the performer. Just a performance. This is where the courts and the laws and the lawmakers logic breaks down.
If I write a book, I can copyright the book, or if I write sheet music, I can copyright that, but the reading of the book or the performance of the music is not a thing and cannot rationally be thought of as a “copy”. THEREFORE, if a person records a performance, that recording has no ownership. It is not a thing. it is not real, it has no tangible or physical existence and “copies” of such performances are not the property of the performer or his publisher and neither are any recordings made of the performance.
A musician may copyright his own written sheet music, a playwright may copyright his own script, a speaker may copyright his own written speech, but none of these can rationally expect to contain, restrict or profit from a performance of the same. Neither his own performance of it, or someone else’s performance of it. Only the written work may be copyrighted and thus not copied by others unless paid for. Once a performance is made, it is released into the wild, it floats out to all who would record it and those copies of the recording are no one’s property, only the media it is recorded on (a tape, a record, a disc, etc.) is property of the holder and can be owned, but the recording that is on the media is nothing.
Now enter the digital age where the disc and the tape and the record have been replaced by “virtual” copies of these recordings and you have removed the last vestige of the claim to “property” rights in the recording because the recordings are transmitted without media. Such recordings have no ability to be property and therefore cannot be owned or copyrighted or have their distribution restricted in any way. It is the equivalent of me trying to “own” a particular volume of atmosphere; it cannot be logically done, nor can it be rationally enforced. If I try to sue you for breathing “my” air, people would laugh, not attempt to litigate the case. A digital recording has even less material existence than air does.
The people who attempt to sue over the transmission of recordings need a rubber room, not a day in court.