Double Whammy

The creeping intrusion of Bug Government in the online world continues apace.

Pirate Bay, the Swedish Bit Torrent affiliate, has been forced to move its servers to the Netherlands as the authorities in Sweden clamp down (and hackers take their revenge on Swedish Government websites) and the EU (yes, them again) are looking at ways of harmonizing tax for online goods so that it is applied at the point of purchase rather than the point of sales, so all those companies based in Luxembourg, Portugal and Jersey will have no tax advantage.

The fundamental issue with both of these situation is that there is an attempt to impose borders on services that simply don't recognize geography.

This would seem to be a good time to take the servers to Antigua for the summer.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Bit Torrent has been publicly asserting their intention to go legit and their deal with Warners was presumably conditioned on this to some extent.
Would they not be pressuring their affiliates to follow their lead?
Iolo Jones said…
Good point. I think experience shows that all these services go legit eventually - or die. Pirate Bay is an operator using Bit Torrent technolgoy, but they could easily use other P2P software. What I find interesting is that they moved from Sweden to the Netherlands in short period of time to get around local legislation.