Yet another epic fail

We all know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Usually, it’s the people who are trying to get a free lunch who have to pay for it after all. In the case of Pirate Bay, an internet file-sharing service, it’s the people who have been serving the lunch who might end up paying a high price: prison.

A Swedish court convicted four men linked to Pirate Bay for violating copyright law. The site doesn’t store any content, but it links to thousands of songs, films, video games and other material, and helps users to download them. The site has about 20 million users worldwide. And I think I know a couple of them…

On the Pirate Bay site, a notice was posted calling the decision a “crazy verdict”. The notice included the following sentences:

“But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing Hollywood ever taught us.”

They could be right. The “pirates” have already appealed against the verdict, which means another three or four years before a new verdict is returned. In the meantime, what effect will it have on illegal downloading? Very little, I imagine.

Gregor Pryor, lawyer at UK-based Reed Smith, explained what the verdict means. Pryor told the Financial Times:

"The reality is that this means next to nothing. The history of anti-piracy litigation, starting with Napster . . . Kazaa and now Pirate Bay, shows a different type of technology each time. The law is moving towards a higher level of protectionism but ultimately technology is ahead of the law almost every time."

The entertainment industry still hasn’t worked out how to exploit the internet. Instead of an epic victory with this case, they could be heading for an epic fail.

The term “epic fail” is an interesting one and demonstrates just how flexible the English language is. "Failure" is normally the noun, while "fail" was, until recently, usually just a verb. "Epic fail" is an internet meme. It probably started in the gaming industry, but then spread over the internet after sites like failblog.org started to keep track of epic fails. People send them to their friends via e-mail or write about them on blogs, making the term more widespread — like the illegal downloads.

But why "epic fail"? If something is epic it’s of epic proportions. In the case of "epic fail" it’s not epic in a Greek heroic sense, but epic as in devastatingly bad. Epic fail is often used to describe someone’s failure at something after they were arrogant about what they were about to do. Could this then be the right term to describe the entertainment industry's internet policy?