[miz_wright]

I think the most important bit in the BoingBoing article is this:

After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it's certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course -- just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more "moderate" services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill

As I may have commented before, we've now (and by "we" I refer to the entire entertainment community, adult and mainstream) but the consumer in a position where what started benignly ("My friend is far away and instead of making a taped copy of this CD and mailing it, I'm going to use this new fangled internet thing to see if I can send it to him") has become a massive "us" vs. "them" - and never the twain shall meet.

In this scenario, all players hate one another - they hate us 'cos we're the media conglomerates they see as evil; we hate them for being active thieves. The more we pursue them as criminals, the deeper they will burrow and find new ways to evade.

The question becomes, again, how do we protect ourselves without villanising and alienating our audience?