Bad week for pirates

First, there’s all that trouble on the high seas from and for Somali pirates. (Can’t a rogue swashbuckler just be left alone to ply his trade without all these dogooders rescuing the hostages and killing or capturing the hardworking pirates?)

Now, several of the founders of the bit torrent site The Pirate Bay (which currently shows the headline “Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. :-)”) have been convicted of a number of copyright-infringement-related crimes in a Swedish court of law. (As yet another sign that I should really read the news more, I learned this from Stephen Fry’s tweets.) Some of the news stories:

• LA Times: Swedish court finds Pirate Bay file sharing creators guilty, Hollywood hails ruling
• CNN: Four sentenced to jail in landmark piracy case
• The Register: Pirate Bay guilty verdict: Now what?

You can view The Pirate Bay’s own press conference (and other related videos) at http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php or http://bambuser.com/channel/Spectrial. They seem to be getting a lot of hits on it so the playback might be a little choppy in parts. It’s quite funny to watch — at one point, Peter Sunde (who is boyishly cute and quite personable, which helps the overall impression that digital piracy is the realm of Robin Hoods, unlike high seas piracy) remarks that even if he had the money to pay the levied fine, he’d rather burn everything he owns than give one penny to pay the fine. Shades of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart: “They will never take away our FREEDOM!” 😉

You can also follow comments related to the trial on Twitter.

(As an aside — I like asides, in case you couldn’t tell; I should probably start writing like Lesley at Um…What?? — why on earth do people persist in writing that the four people were “jailed” or “sent to jail”. “Sent to jail” implies an immediate action — if their butts aren’t physically in a cell at the time you write that, they’d better just be in transit there. And “jailed” is exactly what it says — they’re in jail at this very moment. They haven’t gone to jail yet (in fact, they were going to be partying in Malmö the night of the verdict) and probably won’t any time soon (they have oodles of appeals to go through yet).

Bad word choice makes the baby Jesus cry. You don’t want that.)

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Mad World

I usually stop watching American Idol when the auditions are done. I find the early weeks of the actual competition dull. Sometimes I start watching again when it’s down to the top 10 or so, if someone I liked in the auditions is still in the game. XUP’s mention of Adam Lambert singing “Mad World” on the April 7th show resparked my interest. (He’s been one of my faves since he auditioned with Bohemian Rhapsody — and parts of the snippet of Cher’s “Believe” that he sung during the Hollywood auditions were just chilling.) 

“Mad World” one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s not a happyhappy song in the first place, but Adam’s performance of it — both live and in the full studio version — is incredibly sad, more haunting, for some reason, than even the Gary Jules‘ cover, on which Adam’s was based. Very much the kind of music you listen to when it’s rainy or foggy or you’re in “one of those moods”.

Even though you probably shouldn’t.