The real story comes to the front

In a Canadian court battle that has expectedly not been covered by big media, lawyers for isoHunt, a search site based in Canada that helps find torrents, have launched a petition to get the legality of their site decided in Canadian court once and for all. This after big entertainment has been threatening them endlessly with lawsuits. This has severe legal implications in Canada, as isoHunt is basically arguing that their site is no different (although more specialized) than Google or any other search engine. Ruling against them would be tantamount to suggesting that all search engines violate copyright law because they enable the discovery of material that infringes copyright.

I suggest that the entertainment industry be careful else the very tools they use to find supposedly illegal material online could be rendered illegal itself, making the job of finding the stuff much harder.

[Update] It turns out that the Pirate Bay trial result in Sweden has opened the same can of worms. As Cory Doctorow said on boingboing:

"When The Pirate Bay was ordered shut down by the Swedish courts because it linked to infringing torrents on the Internet, many people pointed out that Google links to whole mountains' -- whole planets' -- worth of infringing stuff. Now, to make the point, comes The Pirate Google, a Google mashup that finds torrent files: "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."

But all of this just goes to show once again that people are missing the point. Thanks to technology, including the massive capacity of hard drives and the high speed of the internet, there is no longer any control over distribution of content. Let me put it another way. There is nothing you can do, short of outlawing technology, that will prevent people from easily and quickly getting copies of stuff. Because that's what technology has made possible. So what the entertainment industries need to do before they completely lose touch with reality (assuming it's not too late already) is to acknowledge that there is no longer a future in making money from content distribution, because technology has put that power in the hands of those who can do it best - the consumer. Sorry guys. Your gravy train is derailed. Find a new way to make money from your consumer..... you know... one that doesn't involve suing them.