I’ve been very fortunate to never having been there, but common sense tells me that on the battlefield of war, the higher you stick your head up, the more likely you are to become a target.

If you stand up in a multi-coloured suit, waving your arms around and singing at the top of your voice, it’s a safe bet that you won’t be doing it indefinitely.

You’d also be doing something suitably analogous to the stance taken by The Pirate Bay, the infamous website which indexes and lists popular BitTorrent files flying around the internet sharing files which include, amongst others, newly released films, music and software.

Back in the heady days of 2001 when the music industry went after MP3 sharing website Napster, the case was fairly clear cut because the site stored lists of the music available on each of its users computer. When you searched for a track on Napster, it was the site that told you where to get it and then hooked you up, thus it was clearly facilitating the sharing of music.

BitTorrent is different because you don’t download files from one particular place and The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, had maintained that simply providing a way to find existing BitTorrent files on the internet is nothing more or less than a specialised search engine.

The argument seemed valid but with the might of the music and movie industry against it, it was perhaps inevitable that after a lengthy court battle, last week the two people running The Pirate Bay were found guilty of ‘assisting making available copyrighted content’ and sentenced to a year in prison.

Interestingly there seems to be no ruling made about the actual site and a week after the ruling it is still up and running.

Two things strike me as ludicrous about the judgement – which I fully expect to be overturned at the inevitable appeal. Firstly, even if The Pirate Bay closes, it does nothing to actually effect BitTorrent files which will still be out there on the net. Secondly, this means that any search engine that finds copyright material is equally culpable of the same charge.

Watch out Google.

File sharing will never go away, it will simply move places. The media industries need to understand this and use it to their benefit rather than endlessly swipe at the hydra’s current head.