Pirate Bay to Sue Music Industry Lobbyist

Just when we all got used to the comforting routine of lobbyists for the recording industry suing the Pirate Bay, and the Swedish peer-to-peer tracker getting around the  suits due to differing laws in the US and Sweden, things have gone all topsy-turvy.

Indeed, The Pirate Bay is suing the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry for blocking access to the popular P2P destination. 

While I think that the Pirate Bay's ethos can basically be distilled to "we don't want to pay for music or DVDs", the ongoing legal battles highlight a few important truths about the current state of the entertainment economy: material (especially music, which is easier to share at lower qualities than video) is widely available online, and record labels have been very late in making it worthwhile to end users: it's hard to beat free, even if it is illegal, and, most importantly, until very recently legal downloads have had too many restrictions on end use: it was too much of a pain in the butt to actually use legally-purchased files, whereas the illegal downloads are restriction-free. This has been, for some reason, very difficult for the major labels to comprehend.

We'll see how this plays out, and also if rivers begin to flow uphill, or if Superman is replaced by Bizarro.