Well the news it out that The owners and operators of Piratebay.org, one of the major hubs for torrent search, were found guilty of assisting in copyright piracy. This is a perfect example of how powerful lobbies can exert pressure on Judges and the Legal System to get what they want and force rulings that go against any kind of logic. The Piratebay does not host any content whatsoever, all they give you are torrent files which let you join private networks where certain files are being shared, so they are guilty of pointing the way to something illegalish, but that’s not actually a crime. The Sweden ruling has crazy implications for large search engines, like Google, because when someone wants to illegally download Rap Music Single, all they do is go to google and type in “Rap Music Single Torrent” and google gives you a list of a few dozen places that have what you’re looking for. So, in essence, google provides the EXACT same service that piratebay.org does. Can of worms indeed. All of this is a symptom of a greater problem, the problem that was created when the Internet became a global phenomenon, which is we need new definitions of intellectual property, according to the strict sense of these anti-piracy laws someone who is humming a song at his cubicle within earshot of ten people has committed piracy, and what would happen if somehow we all got telepathy, and what one person knows or experiences, everyone could know or experience, what would happen to intellectual property then? Virtually everything would be in the public domain, and even though this is a fantastic example, I think it points to something germinal about the nature of knowledge, and as our information systems get better and better, we could almost have a sort of telepathy by proxy, where our silly notions of owning ideas like real estate just don’t work. Do Isaac Newtons descendants get reimbursement for their fathers co-discovery of Calculus? The entire collection of electronics, computer and software industries owe Charles Babbage vast sums of royalties for his elementary work on ancient computers, we’d probably have to invent a new number just to enumerate how much money we owe this guy and his descendants, but that will never happen, because good and useful knowledge belongs to the world. Of course I think inventors should be able to profit from their inventions, but owning ideas is not the way.