So a Swedish court has finally caved in and charged the PirateBay guys with whatever imaginary offence the IFPA made up for them. By way of a thought experiment, here's a few of questions about what this means.
Question 1: will prosecuting the guys who run PirateBay - who don't even know where in the world the PB servers are located any more - close down the site?
Question 2: if, just for the sake of argument, this action really did somehow close down PirateBay, what impact would that have on the number of people who share files over the Internet?
Question 3: to what extent would closing down PirateBay - assuming it was possible and assuming that this was the way to achieve it - fix the music and film industries' ludicrously broken business models?
And for extra credit: how much time and resource do you think film and music execs have put into pursuing the PirateBay, compared to the time and resources they've put into coming up with the innovations that might possibly offer a future for their businesses?
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