Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.

The folks behind the public encyclopedia launch Wikia, a project to develop open-source search tools.

Filed under: Household

Continuing on in the grand tradition of products designed to let you be a lazy as possible, the "All-Sound-Catch Cubic Pillow" doesn't look particularly comfortable, but that doesn't appear to be the point. The cushion lattice allows you to stretch out on the couch without muffling any sound, allowing you use the smallest possible amount of energy to, say, talk on the phone. We're just worried that the Lazy Wii Guy will get a hold of one and cause, like, a negative energy vortex that destroys the universe.

[Via TokyoMango]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Chief software architect Ray Ozzie says everything Microsoft does will include an online services component.