There have been a couple of seriously high profile court cases lately against the, so called, ‘illegal file sharing’ sites. Last year Torrent Spy was fined £67m for copyright infringement, which is one of the largest fines ever imposed for copyright infringement. More recently, the very popular ‘The Pirate Bay’ were fined £2.6m and the four men responsible for the site have been sent to prison for a year. The site has now been bought by Swedish software firm Global Gamin Factory for £5m.

It’s believed that popular pirate sites will become legitimate businesses now so that they can make money from their ventures.

This is where I put my controversial foot down….How sad that these fines have been forced on these inspiring file sharing groups. OK, yes it’ll illegal, I’m not disputing that. What I find criminally offensive though, is that it is these same media companies claiming copyright infringement when you can still buy a new release DVD for £20+, which is sickening in itself, but then they pay celebrities phenomenal amounts of money to appear in these movies, which quite frankly are copies of films that have been done before! That’s right – I’m claiming that these companies (and I’m not naming them in case they put their weight against me too!) are recycling the same old drivel over and over again and they’re charging us extortionate amounts of money for it. Don’t think it’s extortionate? How much do you think they pay in America for a film? Different pricing for different countries, how fair are these companies? They should be sued and the money handed back to those who bought CD’s and DVD’s.

I would very strongly argue that the type of person who downloads media illegally are really high media users, such as myself, who would happily purchase music, films and software if fairly priced. I would also suggest that, a lot of people involved in downloading are also buying media, so are the medi suppliers really losing out?

It was enevitable that the file sharing sites would be shut down eventually but what I hope from this is that the are taken up commercially and sensible arrangements are made to allow sharing to continue, more virus free, with a far more appropriate charge by the providers. I doubt it will happen though, I suspect that a new method of file sharing will simply appear, in another country that doesn’t have copyright laws. Good.