The verdict of the Pirate Bay trial was possibly the most controversial event in the history of file sharing. With each owner owing fines of close to $1,000,000 each, and a year in prison, the people behind the scenes of P2P support on the Internet are finally being scrutinized. Not that this is Pirate Bay’s first run in with the law, but this is definitely the first time which I can recall in which the owners of a file sharing website have been hit this this hard in the legal department.

An important detail of the Pirate Bay trial was how the judge chose to view this case: by intent. All technical aspects of the trial were basically tossed aside, and only the owners intent was questioned. Many people felt this was a big mistake, considering the technical details are what made Pirate Bay almost indistinguishable from many other sites performing similar, very legal services. One of these sites being very, very well known: Google.

And thus The Pirate Google was born!

“Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI…”

While The Pirate Google has no real affiliation with Google, it works quite well.  It uses some simple Google-Fu to search for torrent files.  The site takes the search string and appends the filetype:torrent argument in order to search all of Google indexed pages containing a torrent file.  This is perhaps even more powerful than the Pirate Bay site in certain conditions.

A quote from the site:

Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent. This technique can be used for any type of file supported by Google.

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

This site is created in support of an open, neutral internet accessible and equitable to all regardless of political or financial standing.

Cheers!

The quote illustrates the controversy of the guilty verdict, showing how the Pirate Bay’s functionality crossed no more lines than any others do, they are just being targeted due to their themes and attitudes.  While no one really denies that fact that the Pirate Bay did have a hand in software piracy in terms of function and theme, this really just makes them an easy target for corporations like the IFPI to pick on them for performing a legal service.

The fact that nobody wants to pick on the elephant in the room is not the way a verdict should be made, and many P2P enthusiasts are making this clear with statements like this.

The Pirate Bay verdicts will be appealed, and hopefully issues like these will make a stronger case the second time around.