Get your jaunty eye-patches ready, it’s pirate season here in the United States. And no, I’m not talking about baseball.

I’m talking about the Pirate Bay trials.

Guardian.co.uk is reporting that Four defense lawyers for Pirate Bay, a website that allows people to download files from one another, just gave their closing statements on the 11th day in court. If their closing statements work, then it’s going to be a beautiful day to be a pirate.

The lawsuit is over copyright issues. People are using the website to download copyrighted material.

The prosecution claims that the people who run Pirate Bay have been making millions off of the website through ad revenue. The defense, in their closing statement, called the claim an exaggeration, and pointed out that the website doesn’t pull in enough money through ads to support itself.

Per E. Samuelson claims that, “just because something may have been used by people for illicit purposes, should that mean that there should be an attack on the infrastructure as a result?” He goes on to talk about how, just because a car has a problem, we can’t sue the automakers.

But then again, automakers don’t have tag lines on their websites that say, “Download music, movies, games, software!”

I have mixed feelings about websites like this. On one hand, it’s illegal to steal other people’s hard work. On the other, it’s hard to justify spending hard earned money on a CD album that only has a few decent tracks on it. It’s hard to justify buying a game that has little-to-no replay value. It’s hard to justify buying a movie that you’ve never seen before.

Especially in these times.

File sharing sites like Pirate Bay are just the next logical step of capitalism. If we as a society believe in having a free market economy, we need to be able to try out products before we buy them. It’s a way of sussing out what is, and what is not a “good product”.

And to the arguments about how file sharers don’t contribute back to the owners of the files they steal, I give you this tidbit from P2Pnet.net about online piracy:

“The entertainment industry’s ongoing to failure to give the customers what they want – that’s to say decent product at a reasonable price – is a major reason for sharing files.”

It seems like a bizarre sense of logic, to buy something after you downloaded it. But think about it this way: people who download files, without buying the content, know that they’re stealing. If a company makes good content, they’ll want that company to stay in business. To make that company stay in business, and to be able to download their files later, file sharers will have to go out and buy the product.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find my peg leg.

David Loret de Mola can be reached at [email protected]