A pretty eventful few days for pirates.

Sometimes it seems like how ever many times people say it, the people at the top just don't understand that you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Yesterday after a long struggle the pirate bay seems to have been taken down although for how long is a different matter [edit: it's back up]. I'm sure there was a ten minute dip in piracy as people found new torrent search engines. I noticed a lot of people desperate for Demonoid invites on Digg yesterday. And this is what happens every time of course, a fairly recent example of which was oink. I'm sure that closing oink down has had relatively no impact at all on it's users habits, as will TPB.
On a closely related note, I read in music week today that the idea of banning people from the internet is being considered for cases of piracy (presumably focused on music piracy as all of this has come back into focus after Mandelson's talks with the head of Geffen the other day.) Now correct me if I'm wrong but did the European court of human rights not decide the last time this was being discussed that internet access in this modern age is a human right? The other ridiculous side of this idea that seems to be being batted around is fines as large as £50,000. Never mind the morallity of all of this, which countless people have talked about, have the majors seriously not learned from the PR disasters of the past? Suing your customers will not make them loyal to you, and your sure as hell can't sue them all.
Talking of retracing your own mistakes, another story I read in Music Week this morning was about the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) suing companies that publish song lyrics online. Now note that getting lyrics for legitimately purchased songs online for free (the only price I would ever pay to read some lyrics) is not a service that as far as I know is even offered by the NMPA, or any of the people it represents.
This news today made me decide to start a blog because I need to write this stuff down or I may very likely explode with frustration.