Pirates on trial

So, as most of you will already know by now, day 3 of The Pirate Bay trial is now over. And, although it is probably the biggest blogged thing on the internet this week, but still I thought I would put down my thoughts.

So, first of all, I read what happened today from http://torrentfreak.com/g-defense-090218/ and 1 part of it really made me think. Allow me to quote.

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” Samuelsson told the court.

I have one thing to say about this. If this EU directive really exists and says exactly that, then I’m sorry, but the prosecution have no case. If it is true that the information providers are not responsible unless they initiate the transfer, then they are not quilty of copyright infringment. Plain and simple. And anyone who says differently either manages to find a loophole (stupid lawyers) or is just stupid.

Secondly, I would like to agree totally with what Mehall said that TPB are no guiltier than Google. Infact, this is how I explained it to my non-technical friends, that they are basically google for the torrent world. And torrents in themselves are not illegal, nor are the majority of things in torrents. They just get a lot of bad press. P2P is a fantastic technology and should be used a lot more than it is.

So yeah, if TPB get out of this as the underdog, then it is a great amount of injustice, and we would need to have a wee look at the legal system and see what the heck is happening.

3 cheers for Sony

Now, you normally won’t hear me saying good things about any big companies. Its not actually that they have done anything good anyways. Allow me to explain.

I, obviously, use linux. And this, no doubt, makes people ask me questions. One such person is a guy who is on the same Uni course as me. He asked questions, and this led me to telling him that linux is fantastic, free, etc etc etc. This obviously impacted on him, and today he told me that he installed Ubuntu 8.10 from a WUBI. Obviously, I was pleased, so I asked to see his laptop to see what it was like.

Apart from being kinda slow to start up, it was very pleasing. I assume the slow starting up was because it was going through 2 bootloaders, and stuff. He told me that he had installed compiz, and this made me very shocked, as this implies his graphics card was automatically detected and installed with an Open-source driver. Because as far as I know, Ubuntu does not install anything proprietry without actually asking you. Specifically with drivers.

So, he turned it on, asked me to turn it into a cube, and I did, thus proving that it installed open-source drivers that can handle open-gl. Score 1.

Second of all, I realised that it had automatically connected to the Uni wireless. I asked him if he had installed anything or if it had just worked. The answer – it just worked. Score 2.

Next, I installed and booted up Cheese to see if his webcam worked. It did. Score 3.

Finally, I asked if his sound was working. It was. Score 4.

So, all in all, a very good effort on all accounts. I know Sony probably didn’t have much to do with this, but it is good because I assume that most Sony Viaos will work pretty much the same way with Ubuntu. We now have a new happy Linux user. Granted he hasn’t entered the command line yet…but it’ll come. Don’t worry.