Following the MPAA's gloat about The Pirate Bay being taken down (even if it's only temporary), I decided to send a friendly e-mail to an MPAA e-mail address I found. Here are the contents of the e-mail:

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to send this, but I wanted to thank you for working to finally get The Pirate Bay shut down, and I was wondering if you have plans to go after other illegal sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search as well. Like The Pirate Bay, these search engines provide links to millions -- perhaps billions -- of pirated materials, and I heard that they have even higher usage than The Pirate Bay. I understand that the fact that The Pirate Bay provides searchable links to legal and illegal materials without discrimination does not pardon them from their crimes, and I trust this argument will work equally well against the larger pirate sites like Google. In fact, unlike The Pirate Bay which merely links to materials on other sites and provides generic tracking information, Google even stores "cached" copies of the copyrighted materials on its own site, taking it a step beyond the illegality of The Pirate Bay. I hope you address this problem soon, or we customers will continue to suffer for it.

I completely disagree with the argument some people make that all these actions are doing is alienating potential customers who simply want to trial the movies before purchasing them. After all, when you already have crappy quality foreign language AVIs that skip and get off-sync due to lousy codecs, take a ton of space on your computer, and don't provide any of the features available in the DVD formats, what incentive could you possibly have for purchasing the real thing? Generosity? The open source community has arguably the highest rate of BitTorrent filesharing, and if there's one term that least describes the spirit of open source, it's "generous".

Thank you for your continued dedication to your customers and I wish you the best of the luck in this venture. If all goes well, these millions of pirates will be behind bars and Tom Cruise's paycheck won't have to suffer anymore.

Plz blog if MPAA send you a reply to your brill email.

If file sharing would be banned then there would not be any demand for fast broadband connections, new computers and other hardware, plasma tv etc ... THAT would cost lots of $ and £ but do think even think about that ... nope.

TPB will be back, am sure of it :)