/me pictures preacher running down the street shouting "We're all gonna die!"

and the disclaimer popup for each link is terribly anoying!!!!! How about having that bundled in the registration instead?

ppl will get fed up of clicking real quick

yeah, I am after just 2 clicks.

The extremely popular web site The Pirate Bay as until now been able to operate very freely under the quite liberal Swedish Copyright laws. This will end on 2005-07-01 when a new Swedish law is put to life as a result of EU harmonization. The new law will mean that distribution, uploading, downloading and copying of movies and music you do not own the right to will become illegal.

The Swedish government will from the same date be forced to prevent a huge number of Linux-distributions as a consequence of the new law which prohibits the sales of software or other tools that can be used to bypass copyright protection. Such protection is found on DVD and 'CD' discs. 'CD' discs with copy protection are actually not real CD's at all, the official CD specification from Philips has no room for such protection. This is why modern so-called CDs can not be used in a huge percentage of the CD players sold today. The DVD specification, on the other hand, has built-in protection against copying and therefore also protection against fair use. A DVD can not be used without special software. There are no such legal software available for Linux.

The Movie Industry has numerous times shown that they think Linux-users demand too much when they demand the right to use the DVD discs they have legally bought on their own entertainment systems. Luckily for us, someone quickly managed to create a nice tool that enables fair use of DVD discs on Linux and others non-standard operating systems. The movie industry responded to this by suing the person who made it possible to view my own, legally bought DVDs on my own system. The Norwegian courts dismissed the case and the code for viewing DVD discs on Linux systems are now a standard component in many main-stream Linux-distributions.

This actually means that the sales of Linux-distributions who include media players like Xine and Mplayer will become illegal when the new Swedish Copyright law goes into effect 1st of July 2005.

Next door to Sweden, the Norwegian government will 11. February 2005 propose a similar copyright law that will make the uploading, downloading and distribution of copyrighted material from the Internet illegal there too. Norway currently prohibits uploading and distribution of such files, but downloading is still legal. The leader of the government department responsible for the proposal, Roy Kristiansen at the media department in 'Culture and Church Department' (Norway, like the USA, still has a huge percentage of the population who are blind sheep following some old, outdated and pure stupid religion) refuses to give any details about the proposal until it has been properly presented to the lawmakers. If this law is as stupid and bad as the one Sweden passed then it may actually mean that the official government-sponsored Linux distribution SkoleLinux, must remove several software packages to keep the distribution legal.

The new Swedish laws will mean that RIAA can sue minors and dead people there too as part of their desperate, already-lost struggle against piracy.

Today the swedish anti-piracy organisations raided The Pirate Bay and confiscated the computers running the tracker. This probably means the end of The Pirate Bay and we, the crew, apologize for all loss of income caused by our activity over the years.