It is a sad day for a technology that can be used for legal stuff as well. Now the question is how far they will continue to go with these rulings. Are they going become more agressive in other countries and blaming more ISPs? If a site for legal torrents gets one bad torrent, will it be blamed?

Their website was dedicated to providing copyrighted content for free... just because they did not host that content directly on their servers does not make them innocent, in my book.
You can make a ton of Google analogies if you like, but at the end of the day Pirate Bay is dedicated strictly to providing people a way around copyrights and google is not.

I'm being upfront about it, in my opinion you are the one obfuscating. It's a simple fact that a punishment-free method of downloading copyrighted games for free exists. My arguement is clear: people who want free things and don't care about others will use this method to download games they should be paying for.
You can call that theft or pirating or whatever you want to, but it is illegal and it occurs constantly.
My arguement continues that this piracy harms the industry in numerous ways such as some amount of lost sales, some damaging of investor confidence, some lack of enthusiasm for the PC as a platform and some amount of detterrence to PC development.
You're saying bullshitting about piracy is more what causes this damage than the actions themselves, and I say that is hogwash. There is no bullshitting here, these are facts. Any search of a torrent site or pirate forum will show you the actions occur. The people who run development and publishing houses are not stupid, they see these facts for themselves.
You solution seems to be for these managers and executives to accept piracy as inevitable and to concentrate on making the people willing to pay for your product anyway happy. I am sure that will NEVER happen... these companies put way too much money and time into these games and IPs to ever accept them being stolen on any level. Personally, as someone who could possibly create something copyrighted myself someday, and who works for a copyright holding company and doesn't want to lose his job, I agree with them wholeheartedly.
It's simple to play by the rules... you bought Mirror's Edge on Xbox and there is a PC version coming out. Is it worth $50 to play it again on PC? No? Then don't do it. When it hits $20 is it worth it? No? Still don't do it. Or pay and do it. Your life does not end because you didn't play Mirror's Edge on another platform, nor does it end if you pay another $20 for the ability to do that.
People now-a-days have this idea in their heads they are owed something, that they deserve to play this or that in this way or what way. There isn't much discipline, the Western world is spoiled. Pay for your games, ignore the copyright infringement you can do... it's a sign of respect for the creators and investors involved.

Interesting point. I'm one of those older guys, and since most everything has gone FPS and I get too motion sick to play them, I feel like there's very little in the way of new games for me to play sometimes, especially if I look at consoles. I'm crazy for strategy games, but since now almost everything has DRM on the one hand and on the other, RTS's don't play well on consoles, I feel almost forced to go for old GOG games.
I used to play a lot of simulations, from arcadish to complex -- helicopters, NASCAR, tank, motorcycle, plane, etc. -- but they have mostly vanished from the market.
That lack is among the things that make me feel like virtually ever game I buy from now on will be from GOG. Most of the rest of the gaming industry would rather sell shooters, so I guess they're not all that interested in money from moi, even though I can usually afford to buy plenty of games per year without breaking a sweat.

From the analysis I've read of the trial it seems your statement is pretty close to the mark. It seems the prosecution's case was pretty much a mess, and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about the technology involved and how Swedish law would apply to it. In light of that this ruling is rather disappointing, although I'm in agreement with you that it wasn't particularly surprising. After all, these days most countries have the best justice systems money can buy.
This whole matter isn't even close to being over, though. This case will likely be appealed up to Sweden's supreme court, and possibly even to the European Court of Human Rights. So grab your popcorn, everyone, it should be quite an interesting show.
Why should they have taken any measures to prevent people putting up torrents that enable copyright infringement? Doing so would actually have opened them up to additional liability, as they would then be taking direct responsibility for what they allow and don't allow to be hosted on their site as opposed to acting only as a neutral carrier (in the same way that phone companies, ISPs, etc do). Additionally, what you call a "loophole" is a key legal distinction, as TPB was not hosting any copyrighted content, but only hosting information that people could then use to locate content; pretty much no different from doing a Google search with filetype:torrent. With this ruling we've gone from hosting infringing content to being illegal, to simply linking to infringing content being illegal. Next will we see linking to linking to infringing content being illegal? It quickly becomes apparent how ridiculous a path we're headed down.
Well now, as the folks at TPB are quite fond of pointing out, they are located in Sweden, not the US, where, surprise, surprise, Swedish law applies, not US law.
Copyright infringement is becoming so rampant because copyright laws are so out of sync with people's views and with current technology. Surveys have put the number of people who engage in copyright infringement at ~12% in the UK (and I'd expect similar numbers in many other countries), which is probably an extremely conservative estimate. When that large a percentage of the population is violating a law it means there's a problem with the law, and that's what needs to be fixed.
Theft: original owner no longer has their property. Copyright infringement: original owner still has their property. That seems like a pretty major distinction to me. Copyright attempts to create artificial scarcity for information, but with the ease of transferring information these days and an increasing number of people no longer buying into the idea of information scarcity something is going to have to give, and it's not going to be the views of the masses.
Not quite. They ask a price, someone pays it, then that person decides to make duplicates of the work and distribute it. If the business model of investing in, producing, and then releasing something that can be easily duplicated with a marginal cost of zero doesn't work then perhaps the solution should be for people to develop a different business model rather than getting a government enforced monopoly to control the exchange of information.
Ah yes, the purpose of copyright law. What was that again? Let's see, for you and me, being in the US, its purpose is laid out quite clearly in the constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of scientific and artistic works, so that we, the people, can benefit from them (when they fall into the public domain). Note a key aspect of this is that copyright is supposed to be limited; creators get a bit of time to recoup their investment, then the public gets to use those works however we damn well please. Except these days copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years in the US; I'll be dead before any work created today falls into the public domain, and that's not exactly what I'd consider a limited time for any practical purposes. Given that content creators (with the help of their bought and paid for government representatives) have pretty much completely reneged on their side of the copyright bargain, why should members of the public feel any imperative to keep upholding our side of that bargain?
And since you bring the idea of capitalism into it (and understand that I'm a pretty big free market proponent), I should point out that copyright is pretty much antithetical to pure capitalism, as it is government interference in the free market in the form of creating artificial monopolies and restricting what people can trade.
Sounds like you're one of this generation's buggy whip makers. Might want to start thinking about different business models under which your work could once again be profitable in a world where any released information is instantly ubiquitous.
You know, I agree, people tend to have an obscene sense of entitlement these days. It's pretty insane how so many people believe that after producing and releasing information they should continue to be paid for the rest of their lives without having to do any additional work. It really blows one's mind.

1. Yes it does and yes it is, I'm not disputing that.
2. I'm not disputing that it harms the industry, I just question how much it harms it and to what extent they're using piracy figures incorrectly.
3. I'm not saying the bullshitting is what's causing the damage, I just dislike it. Earlier you said piracy affects investments, and that affects the industry. If it turns out that piracy doesn't affect sales that significantly and this information was shown clearly, perhaps those investors would feel more confident. I'm actually ready to accept that piracy does affect sales significantly, but all we get to back it up is the number of copies pirated, and that is simply not adequate proof.
4. Piracy *is* inevitable, they may be able to make it more difficult and reduce it somewhat, but as to making a significant dent in rates of piracy? I'll believe it when I see it. If they really think that it's a financially sound business move to attack pirates and try and reduce piracy then more power to them. I just think that it's not such a wise move and that they're fighting a losing battle. Their efforts would be better placed elsewhere.
5. I'd say that's a perfect example of useless artificial morality. I would *never* have purchased Mirror's Edge on the PC, I'd paid for it on the 360 so it was just never going to happen. I fancied trying it, so I downloaded it. This affects no one - I don't torrent so I wasn't assisting anyone else in pirating it - there was absolutely zero consequence. Beyond this, why on earth would I stop myself?
6. I'm just a random schmo on the net to you so you may not believe this, but that's about as far from the truth about me as you could get. I've no feeling of entitlement, I don't feel I'm owed anything whatsoever. There's no feeling of "I deserve to play Mirror's Edge on PC for free because of XYZ". The simple fact was I wasn't going to pay for it regardless, so I downloaded it. It was a completely morally neutral act. If an action has absolutely no consequence to anyone then I fail to see how it could be considered "wrong".
Just to make it clear - the Mirror's Edge example applies to one particular scenario, I don't think for a second that every bit of pirated software is like that.

The U.S. (and presumably some other countries) has a "safe harbour" clause; basically, this means that a hosting site will not be held accountable if they were not aware of or promoting the illegal material and then respond swiftly when it is brought to their attention.
A good example of this is YouTube. People constantly upload episodes of Naruto or whatever despite the Terms of Service clearly stating that uploads must be user-created or allowed to be reproduced; YouTube cannot possibly stop all these infringements but responds swiftly when a copyright holder brings it to their attention. Some copyright holders don't care about some types of uploads done without their permission (especially trailers of movies and games) and simply won't bother asking YouTube to remove them.
The "safe harbour" clause relies on some degree of ignorance or futility on the part of the hosting site. The Pirate Bay does not qualify because they knowingly host and promote obviously illegal content (which is the origin of the site's name) and have repeatedly laughed at pleas and threats from copyright holders. A site that focusses on entirely legal torrents having a few illegal ones slip through would be protected by the "safe harbour" clause, however, as long as their response was swift and it did not seem like they were knowingly encouraging or promoting such uploads.

Can't say I'm surprised, and honestly, part of me approves despite my hatred of the RIAA/MPAA and friends.

No, it NEEDS to be stopped, the sheer number of people who break the law do it because THEY CAN FUCKING GET AWAY WITH IT, it's that simple. You're not going to get caught pirating games/music/movies off the internet. There's pretty much no downside.
Yes, there are a lot of things that are insane that need to be changed pertaining to the music, game and movie industry. I will not deny that. But proclaiming that the copyright infringement laws are wrong because people are breaking them, is ignorant.
Copyright laws protect intellectual property. In theory. And if someone wants to charge $50 for someone to enjoy their intellectual property, then that's fine. If people are willing to pay that $50.
If people aren't willing to pay that $50, then they don't get to enjoy it. End of story. The owner of that intellectual property will either a: learn people don't want to pay $50, and lower his asking price or b: leave his price as-is, not caring.
(Now, I do think a hell of a lot more money should go to the people who CREATE the things, and less to the people who put it in a box and pimp it. That though, is unrelated to the subject at hand.)
Now answer me this. How exactly are those laws in need of being fixed? ("Intellectual property means nothing, take what you want and to hell with the creator."?)
And, for everyone who's going on about the 'lost sales' argument.
I just challenge you to look at it from the other sides perspective.
Say you develop a video game, and you're selling it for $10. You sell 10 copies, but you find out there are 100 people who currently have your game. Are you going to be perfectly happy with that fact? Are you going to say "well they wouldn't have bought it anyways, so no loss.", I highly doubt it. You're more likely going to feel like you were cheated out of $900.
Now imagine it were hundreds of thousands of people not paying for your game. You might continue to make a fair amount of money off your game because more people are buying it too, so your sales are not declining. But there's still that feeling you're being cheated out of an obscene amount of money.
So, pirating a game DOES cut in to the money a company SHOULD be making. Which is actually worse for the big companies than theft. If a truckload of Spore were to get stolen, EA (or whoever was in charge of that particular shipment), would file an insurance claim and get their money. (Which the insurance company pays, because that's what they're paid for.)
A truckload worth of Spore gets pirated? No one gets a penny.

Careful now, your Shift key will get worn out if you keeping shouting so much. Now explain to me, just why is there such a pressing need to stop copyright infringement? Actually, let's go back even further: why should we even have copyright in the first place? Without a good reason to have copyright it cannot be argued that copyright infringement should be considered a problem (or what kind of problem it should be considered), and without being able to argue that copyright infringement is a problem one can hardly then argue that such infringement needs to be stopped.
You see, while a low probability of consequences is a contributing factor to why people break laws, it is by no means the only factor, or even, I'll contend, the major factor. There are a hell of a lot of laws I could break, with almost no chance of being caught; this goes for most people. And yet we don't go around breaking these laws left and right. Why not? Because most of us recognize the reasons behind these laws, and thus the harm we'd be doing (to either individuals, society as a whole, or both) if we were to break the laws. It's the societal mores that keep us in line more than the fear of punishment. The only reason why we even need these mores codified into laws with punishments attached is to deal with a fairly small minority who have little or no concern for the harm they'd be doing if not for fear of punishment. However, when you have a law that runs contrary to the mores of a significant percentage of the population all you have left preventing all those people from violating the law is fear of punishment, and when the chance of getting caught then drops to near zero you have the situation we currently see with copyright infringement.
So how do you go about addressing this? There's the solution you seem to be advocating, which is focusing on the punishment part of the equation. However, this does nothing to address the underlying issue (the disconnect between a society's laws and mores), and requires that the government's relationship with the governed become ever more authoritarian and oppressive. And eventually you'll see a backlash, likely political, but possibly violent, depending on how long things have been building up. Not pretty. The better solution is to address the underlying problem, by harmonizing society's laws and mores. One extreme in doing this is to try to alter society's mores to conform to its laws. Several content providers have been trying this for some time ("You wouldn't steal a car..."), and I think we can see how well that approach has been working. The other extreme is to fully change society's laws to conform to its changing mores (in this particular case that would be fully doing away with copyright). There's also a full spectrum of compromises between these two extremes, which is typically the way you want to go (as there is at least some portion of society who has mores that led to the problematic law to begin with); in short, what needs to happen is the problematic law needs to be altered enough to be palatable to as large a portion of society as possible, and also needs to reconcile conflicting mores to as great an extent as possible, with the compromises involved being understandable and acceptable to as many people as possible.
Well, glad we got that one settled. Now, for the bigger question, just why should we have the artificial construct of "intellectual property" to begin with?
Glad you asked. Copyright is supposed to be a bargain between creators and the rest of society. Creators are granted a temporary monopoly on the reproduction of their works to assist them in financially recouping their investment, as an incentive for them to create. In exchange for this temporary monopoly, society gets full use of the work once the monopoly is up (the work falls into the public domain). The major problem with current copyright laws is that this monopoly content creators are granted is no longer temporary for any practical purposes (currently the length is life of the creator plus 70 years in the US). Society isn't exactly getting much in return for the monopoly we've given content creators.
The first and major thing that needs to be done is to drastically reduce the length of copyright. Original length was 14 years with an additional 14 years if renewed. Since distribution methods have become far cheaper and far, far faster this length should to be reduced even further. Copyright should be for 5 years, with the possibility for a one-time 5 year renewal upon payment of a fee of 5-10% of the total gross revenue gathered from the work in the first 5 years. Additionally, the use of any technical barriers that would hinder use or reproduction of the work once in the public domain voids any copyright protection (e.g. DRM and copyright are an either/or proposition). Next, damages in copyright infringement cases are limited to 3x actual damages (retail cost of the work infringed, multiplied by number of times infringement occurred) for non-commercial infringement, and 3-10x actual damages for commercial infringement (with possible criminal penalties depending on the specifics of the case). Fair use needs to be more specifically defined, and also more broadly defined for non-commercial purposes; bringing repeatedly legal action against those exercising their fair use rights results in forfeiture of the copyright in question. There's a fair bit more I'd also change, but it starts branching out into other laws that are related to copyright but not an explicit part of it, so I'll leave it there for now.

Dear Mr/Ms. StingingVelvet,
I will firstly apologize for calling you narcissistic and furthermore I will try to steer this conversation towards something more civil.
So please, take a deep breath and read this at your leisure
Let's take a look at this sentence, together:
"Piracy is hurting the PC games industry"
Now let's break that down into parts using information analysis tools.
I then come up with these 2 sentences
1. The pc games industry is hurt.
2. This hurt is caused by piracy
Now, my question.
Can you prove with figures and figures only, no assumptions whatsoever or subjectivity that the first sentence is a fact.
Then and only then if that fact is established we will both look for lots and lots of different reasons why this industry is hurt.
Then I will present you with my reasons and you do the same with yours, this will be a brainstorming session so you don't have to worry about figures, yet.
If we both have come with the different reasons why the industry is hurt we will try to see if either statistics and figures can be found in regards to those reasons or if a method can be used to provide figures for each and every reason.
We discard the number of reasons where we can't find a method of providing stats for.
Next step is getting stats for the reasons using the methods we came up with.
If a method doesn't work for a reasons we will try to change the method.
Now we discard all of the reasons were numbers couldn't be acquired.
Then we, still you and I, present those reasons, each with the testing method used, the numbers which could be found and both our conclusions on all of the reasons to multiple third parties.
Then we check if the third parties found the same kind of numbers and also came up with the same conclusions as we did.
Then we have solved the mystery as to what is hurting the PC games industry.
Then and only then have we come up with a method where not only we both have to agree on the outcome of it, but also the rest of the world.
This would be the way wouldn't it? To settle this discussion, if you have a better idea or think that a step is missing from this information analysis process I would very much like to hear from you.
But first still this sentence:
"The PC games industry is hurt"
has to be proven, before we engage on this daunting task.
Unfortunately in previous posts I made I already proved that this is not a fact, it is a fallacy.
The PC games industry is growing rapidly worldwide in almost every country on this earth.
The only thing which I have concluded from all of the figures I have read yesterday, is that some pieces of cherry pie which formerly ended up on the plate of retail sales, now end up on the plates of online distribution (primarily steam) and monthly fees (WOW and a whole bunch of asian MMO's).
But still the pie is getting bigger and bigger every year.
Kind regards, Rob (<- that is my real name)

Well my only piracy is temporary video piracy and that could be solved permanently if the BBC & Comedy Central would pull a GOG and offer worldwide, DRM free basic XVID AVIs of Doctor Who & South Park for au$2-3 on the same day they screened on TV. No specials or anything like that, just the same stuff you get off torrents.
I'd buy those as soon as they were released, hell if they offered a subscription to the shows per series then I'd pay for that too. Even after that I'd still get them on DVD for extras and the having a physical copy which I usually prefer. They could actually get MORE money out of me if they were to do that.

Games and movies are different. With movies and things, you need distributors to clear all the rights for music, videos, etc. for all regions. Games aren't, as they're usually distributed by either the publisher's regional location and/or they don't care.

/agreed

Torrenting can be okay, but it depends if you are torrenting old music, tv, and games you cannot buy anywhere.
I use thepiratebay to find things like old Romanian folk music and DOS games.
But as soon as it goes onto GOG.com it is OFF Limits for me, and I have to consider it stealing.
I try to be an honorable person who supports what entertains me, etc.
That all being said, I have something to say to the people who stole Demigod.
=====================================================================
To All game pirates who steal new games with the intention of never paying what you OWE back to the developers who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to provide you with entertainment, may you have your TV, PC, Radios, Clothes and cars stolen.
Stardock and GPG poured themselves into making Demigod and the touted that it had no DRM and that they "believe that gamers have respect for their hobby."
Well guess what? Game Pirates have no code of honor, they are selfish people who try and STEAL.
Demigod has no DRM, Stardock respects gamers and yet 120,000 copies were pirated in a couple of days.
To all you game pirates that did this, come forward, tell me why Stardock and GPG do not deserve to feed their children and pay their bills?
If you pirated the game as a demo and it turned into a sale, then god bless you, but I have a good feeling people who stole this game just don't want to pay, FUCK all that rhetoric about " Oh the DRM is killing us, so we are forced to steal it, whine whine whine"
Is the game good? Do you respect your hobby? THEN FUCKING SUPPORT HONEST WORKING PEOPLE YOU DIRTY THIEVES!
=================
Thank you for listening, and it does feel pointless to post it here because we have nice honest people in our community, but I had to put it somewhere.
:D