Property In The Time Of Pirates

Apparently, the judge presiding over the Pirate Bay trail, is a member of two Swedish copyright groups. Certainly enough for a retrail, I should think, and I hope the appropriate officials in Sweden agree with me. Indeed, should anyone ever actually shut down the pirate bay, which seems unlikely, people can get more or less the same information from Google. Perhaps Google can shield itself because it's general search, whereas the Pirate Bay was more specific. Still search is search, and companies like Google actually have money, so they are more likely than not to be a target in the future.

It is a terrible flaw in our system that we have so much imaginary property and that the powerful often use this imaginary property to extract real property from the rest of us.

Meanwhile, the entire world seems incapable of handling real, albeit very poorly armed, pirates off the coast of Somalia. One shipping company out of Israel is known to be armed, and the pirates leave those particular ships alone. Everybody else, apparently wants to put military ships into this area. Seems a bit overkill.

Maybe people ought to be allowed to defend real property, ignore claims of imaginary property, and we could get along pretty well without spending billions of dollars in court or on navies.