The BBC article has some pretty interesting comments from Paul Stoddart, Microsoft UK search lead.

Huh?

<quote><p>Democracy is the force of the majority over the minority. It doesn't matter if you have elections or not.. that's just a formality.</p></quote>

That's just a facet of first-past-the-post democracies.

There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.

Americans...

Parent may not be accurate in stating that this was a jury trial, but his general point still stands: you can't appeal just because you don't like the law. In common law, there would be a procedure where you have to convince a judge that the appeal is worth hearing by the superior court. You can't raise novel points of law, and appeals are generally slow to overturn convictions unless the judge obviously got the case wrong.

Nevertheless, this tactic of letting the highest court hear cases just because there are new and interesting points of law is stupid. Unless TPB has a lot of cash to burn.

As the article already mentions, the case against TPB is very much a moral victory for the MAFIAA. They need to show you can't "get away" with it.

If Google wants to "co-operate" and avoid this kind of shitstorm, they'd enter into agreements with content owners where they'd agree on what kind of limitations is acceptable, in exchange for giving them a break and not pressuring governments to act.

The bad thing would be that this is all settled privately, and not checked by some kind of "rule of law". You might not even be able to tell how they'd modify their search to support such agreements without studying search results all day...

... And for those of us who already know the answer, this is a good opportunity to find out whether there's something new we should be looking at too.

And the worse part is then, you have to imagine that half of the voters are worse than that.