TechCrunch reports today that the Megaupload crackdown cut the site off at the knees just before it planned to launch a disruptive and legal music player. Another popular boogeyman for copyright holders, The Pirate Bay, announced a new, legitimate direction yesterday: It's going to host physibles, downloadable models for constructing 3D objects. Are the "pirate" sites actually Big Content's worst nightmare for legitimate reasons?

A "physible" is a digital plan for an object that can either be designed on a computer or uploaded with a 3D scanner. Those plans can be downloaded and used to assemble real, tangible objects using a 3D printer. Printers are getting more affordable, but they're still limited by the kinds of materials they can use. But that just means it's the dawn of this technology, and The Pirate Bay is getting in early. "We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare [parts] for your vehicles," TPB writes on its blog. "You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

"The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We'll be able to print food for hungry people. We'll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We'll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one."

As a renowned hub for trading files, The Pirate Bay is in a perfect position to be the go-to place for free physibles, which it can facilitate while making money from ads. "We're thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay," the announcement jokes, but hopefully it's half-serious.

It's a perfectly legitimate business, and it blows the 2012 conception of intellectual property to smithereens. There's competition, too; Shapeways and Thingiverse are already on the market, and there's even a Google Warehouse for 3D models. Lobbyists for Old Media love to bang on sites like Megaupload and The Pirate Bay, but those very sites have hatched plans to usher in the future of digital media. When we can download a drum set, pirated MP3s will be the least of the copyright lobby's worries.

Check out The Pirate Bay's physibles category, but it's not our fault if you click on porny spam links.

As vilified as file-sharing has historically been, the practice has been gaining favor in somewhat unexpected places lately. The Songwriter's Association of Canada recently threw its support behind the idea of legalizing file-sharing and finding ways to monetize the practice, rather than cracking down on it through legal means.

"Music file-sharing is a vibrant, open, global distribution system for music of all kinds, and presents a tremendous opportunity to both creators and rights-holders," the organization stated in a proposal. "Additionally, once a fair and reasonable monetization system is in place, all stakeholders including consumers and Internet service providers will benefit substantially."

The news comes shortly after the Swiss government released a report saying that illegal file-sharing isn't a big enough problem to justify cracking down on it as harshly as is being proposed in other European countries.

Canadian songwriters are not advocating a stance quite as hands-off as that, but they do think that file-sharing ought be viewed as an opportunity for artists rather than a threat.

Still, there remains the issue of how the Internet is going to ensure that artists are properly compensated. That is still very much being ironed out. It may well be that in the long run, artists don't profit as much as they once did from selling recorded music and instead have to focus their efforts on bringing in revenue through other means. Even through legal and record label-approved means like Spotify, artists have yet to see a significant financial gain from participating.

Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.

Of course, none of these words are actually blocked from search results, but by removing them from Autocomplete, Google is implicitly discouraging people from searching for them and effectively decreasing the volume of searches performed for each one.

These changes are not by themselves momentous, but they're part of an ongoing evolution in Google's approach to digital piracy and media consumption. It's an issue through which the company has to tread carefully so as not to alienate its users, but at the same time Google is increasingly looking toward traditional content companies to help bolster some of its products.

Most recently, the company announced that they would be offering rentals of Disney movies on YouTube, as part of its ongoing effort to beef up its content offerings. This not only makes YouTube a more competitive service, but paves the way for Google TV to become a more desirable product in the eyes of consumers, who thus far have not flocked to use the platform.

Last week, Google publicly launched Google Music, leaving the cloud locker portion of the product free (up to 20,000 songs), but layering a robust MP3 store on top of it, complete with all kinds of competitive perks. It's that music storefront that gives Google its only hope of monetizing this new initiative, something that wouldn't have been possible without deals from three of the four major music labels.

These "old media" relationships are going to be increasingly critical to Google's success as it extends its business beyond search and goes up against other tech giants like Apple and Amazon.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

The party is no stranger to controversy. It is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker whose operators were prosecuted for copyright infringement in 2009. It also donated server space to WikiLeaks as other ISPs have booted the organization from their servers.

Its Berlin upset marks the biggest electoral win yet for the party, which won two seats in the European Parliament in 2009. Their German victory is politically significant within the country because of the blow it delivers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition and because it secures federal funding for the party. While they're still a minority, the win gives them enough seats to have a say in the regional government.

What Does It Mean For the Web's Role in Politics?

Its meaning beyond the country's borders may be even more significant, even if the party's popularity fails to spread beyond a few European countries. If nothing else, it demonstrates the role that the Internet and issues related to the digital realm can play in electoral politics.

For example, much has been made of the growing impact the Web has had on U.S. politics, especially during the 2008 election, when Barack Obama's campaign used social media and Internet-based fundraising tools to mount an unexpected challenge to more established candidates. Yet, as the U.S. gears up for its next election cycle, its political system itself is largely unchanged, still dominated by the same two parties.

The apparent rise of the Pirate Party marks the first time that a political party has been successfully built on issues pertaining directly to the Internet and digital rights. Such matters are increasingly on the minds of voters everywhere, as people live more and more of their lives online. Even if upstart parties like this don't gain mainstream traction anywhere, they're bound to offer a few lessons to major party politicians, for whom the Web is now not only a crucial campaign tool but an important component of policy itself.

The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR.

"Aaron's arrest should be a wake up call to universities - evidence of how fundamentally broken this core piece of their architecture remains despite decades of progress in advancing communication and collaboration.

The MIT staff who called the FBI would have been served better by calling the chancellor to ask, 'How have we created a system that forces 25 year-olds to sneak around in the basement, hiding hard-drives in closets in order ask basic and important questions about our work? Can't we do better?'"

That sentiment is echoed in the manifesto accompanying the files on The Pirate Bay. Maxwell also blasts the academic establishment and its publishing model. "As far as I can tell," he writes, "the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The 'publish or perish' pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia."

Maxwell claims he came by the papers he's uploaded legally. The documents include the archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a prestigious scientific journal with a history that goes back to the 1600s. The papers in The Pirate Bay torrent were all published prior to 1923 and are in the public domain. He says that he'd originally planned to upload the documents to Wikipedia, but felt that the actions would incur lawsuits from publishers charging copyright violations or, as with in the case of Swartz, would bring about other sorts of criminal charges.

Maxwell argues, "The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it."

Maxwell says he'd considered releasing the documents anonymously, but didn't want Swartz to be blamed when the large quantity of JSTOR files were released.

The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal - and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."

The Cybernorms group made headlines with its research several years ago that analyzed users' behavioral changes when file-sharing became illegal. That research found that there were no social norms that inhibited people from file-sharing.

Moreover, it also found that making file-sharing illegal would do little to stop the practice: "There are strong indications that neither the law in itself nor new legal attempts at enforcing copyright will change the social norm on illegal file sharing. To the opposite, there is a documented willingness of paying for anonymity, keeping the internet flow of content, rather than return to a system of payment for each product."

As one of the most popular BitTorrent sites in the world, The Pirate Bay has a clear interest in supporting this research. And in turn, by collaborating with The Pirate Bay, researchers now have access to a sizable population of active file-sharers. We'll keep you posted on the results.

So rumors that The Pirate Bay is launching a music project may strike fear - or at least disconcertment - in the hearts of industry execs. It's apt, perhaps, that a new project - fear.themusicbay.org - is supposedly in the works.

Torrent Freak wasn't able to secure more details about the project, other than it's set to coincide with an April anniversary of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Even if it's just an MP3 file that jumps out of a large birthday cake at the IFPI's celebration - or, a bit more likely, just a nice domain name, news that The Pirate Bay is plotting something may be enough to make the industry worry, particularly having just released details that the industry's overall worth has declined a downward spiral.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.

A Distributed Alternative to the Domain Name System

Arguing that "we want the internet to be uncensored," Sunde has formed a group to work on the project, a DNS that would not utilize a centralized root but would instead take advantage of peer-to-peer technology. He writes, "By using existing technology for de-centralisation together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We're not going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to build on existing technology as much as possible."

The technology may exist to make a BitTorrent-based alternative possible, but such a system would face a massive uphill battle to provide a viable alternative - in terms of delivering speed and performance, but also in terms of gaining widespread adoption. And as Ars Technica notes, one of the biggest problems will be around the ownership of domain names. "The stakes are high," writes Iljitsch van Beijnum, "even a small fraction of the traffic of a popular site, or even just an interesting search term, can be worth a lot of money. It's hard to imagine that with such high stakes there wouldn't be any abuse of such an open system, or at the very least, widely diverging points of view of what's best."

Despite these obstacles, Sunde's proposal has been met enthusiastically in some circles, which considering the intersection of politics and web technologies over this past week, is hardly a surprise.

In justifying the increase in damages in this ruling, the appeals court said that it had "to a greater extent than the district court, accepted the plaintiff companies' evidence of its losses as a result of file-sharing."

A fourth defendant from the original conviction, Gottfrid Svartholm, was not included in today's verdict as he was absent at the court hearings due to medical circumstances. His case is still pending.

While awarding large damages in these sorts of cases has become common, sentencing people to prison is unusual. Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that ""They're giving us jail even though it's not the right thing for the 'crime.' It's just to scare people. That's what you did in the 1600s." He indicated that the group intends to appeal today's decision to the Swedish Supreme Court.

One of the entertainment industry lawyers, Monique Wadsted, is quoted in the New York Times as saying "My assessment is that in two years this type of piracy activity will be completely dead." However the court battles, including today's ruling, have yet to impact the ability of The Pirate Bay to stay online.

The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites.

Several torrent sites including Pirate Bay were down for users in some countries today.

Five policemen showed up yesterday morning at PRQ, the company that in part hosts Wikileaks, and asked about two IP addresses used in 2009. The company handed over email addresses associated with the IP addresses, which are the only records it keeps on its clients. No servers or computers were confiscated, the company said.

The raid comes as Wikileaks is preparing to release 15,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, which the U.S. government is anxious to prevent. PRQ denied that Wikileaks was the subject of the raid, and Wikileaks has not made any statement yet.

"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crack-down, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or its customers," PRQ said in an email to customers.

The extent and precise targeting of the raid suggest that it was a dedicated effort to crack down on piracy. The fact that one of Wikileaks' hosts was targeted could be a coincidence because Wikileaks and file-sharing sites have similar requirements: security and bravery in the face of international law enforcement.

But stranger conspiracy theories regarding Wikileaks have been proposed. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is claiming rape charges filed against him in Sweden are part of a smear campaign orchestrated by the U.S. government.

What do you think - was Wikileaks a target here?

Update: According to Google, "the removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

According to Chilling Effects, a clearinghouse for DMCA takedown notices, the complaint was apparently sent by an adult entertainment company, Gwen Media's Destined Enterprises, which has filed similar complaints with Google before. According to TorrentFreak, the complaint was sent by RemoveYourContent, a company that specializes in sending out DMCA complaints for the adult entertainment industry.

For the time being, the effect of this takedown notice is that PirateBay.com, a scam site that really shouldn't appear in Google's index, now sits at the top of the search results.

It's important to note, though, that this is far from the first time that Google has deleted search results after receiving takedown notices. To the best of our knowledge, however, this is the first time a well-known site like the Pirate Bay has been affected by this.

This being the Pirate Bay, however, we don't really expect the site to be down for too long. Chances are that the group will simply relocate to another ISP (the service is already somewhat decentralized) or move its operations to an offshore location. Just a few weeks ago, somebody actually created an archive of the Pirate Bay as a torrent file. With this, a third party could possibly recreate the Pirate Bay.

The sale of the Pirate Bay to GGF, however, will remain uncertain, even if the site comes back online. Currently, Swedish stock market regulators are looking into this deal to determine if GGF actually has enough money to complete the deal or if the announcement was just a scam to boost GGF's stock price.

Before jumping to it, it may be smart to remind yourself of the legal issues currently facing both the Pirate Bay founders and perhaps more importantly, the non-commercial cases of Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset.

Most recently, the Department of Justice upheld the award of 1.92 million dollars to the RIAA from single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Minnesota woman Thomas-Rasset is expected to pay $80,000 per song for 24 KaZaA files she'd downloaded in 2004. The RIAA has gone after more than 20,000 people for music piracy, but has more recently chosen to focus on internet service providers rather than on non-commercial infringers. Depending on your country of residence, getting caught using the Pirate Bay archive file could be devastating.

If you're still curious, or you simply want to read the comments, the download page is available here.

On the blog, the group hopes to alleviate concerns by saying:
"If the new owners screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want it to. And - you can now not only share files, but shares, with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat off us."

Judging by blog comments, it's obvious that users are extremely concerned. Global Gaming Factory will be taking over operation of the site in August 2009. As part of this acquisition, GGF can now incorporate the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science's new data distribution technology - Peerialism. Presumably the service will increase torrent speeds.

Additionally, says GGF CEO, Hans Pandeya, "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

It will be interesting to see if fans will stick with the service and how the company's revenue program will differ from predecessors like Grooveshark's compensation service for file uploaders.

Thanks to Steven for the tip!

UPDATE: According to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay will be using a 3rd party tracker and host for torrents. We'll just have to wait and see if this has to do with GGF's move with Peerialism.

The entertainment industry, as Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, will celebrate this as a major victory in the fight against piracy, but in reality, shutting down the Pirate Bay will do little to deter filesharers and won't help the entertainment industry regain any lost market share or find a new business model.

It is also important to note that even though the Pirate Bay may be the most visible torrent-sharing site right now, others like Mininova host almost as many torrents.