Take piratebay.org. This bunch of Scandinavians with a fiercely anti-copyright stance and a BitTorrent tracker have, for some time, kept a public record of their various spats with media companies that threaten them with legal action. That list lengthened last week with the addition of an email conversation pertaining to the work of Indiana Gregg. (The emails are linked to towards the bottom of this page.)

Now, as the Pirate Bay are well known for a) lampooning any artiste representative that sends them furious emails and b) failing to comply with any of their requests, you'd have thought that the reps in question wouldn't bother wasting their time. (Indeed, Enya's webmaster contacted the Pirate Bay, emphasising that "making this email public or ridiculing it will result in immediate legal action"; of course, it was ridiculed immediately.)

But Indiana Gregg's record company went for it anyway, requesting that the torrent file pointing at Gregg's new album should be "removed immediately as this is legal copyright and has not been authorised to be released as an illegal download." The exchange followed a fairly predictable pattern; Pirate Bay co-founder, Peter Sunde, stonewalled with increasingly juvenile responses in the face of mounting anger on the part of the record company and, eventually, Gregg herself.

No-one emerges with much credit; Gregg's camp make enough errors in their use of terminology to look a bit silly, while Sunde comes across as a giggly schoolboy blowing raspberries from a safe distance. Of course, he couldn't care less.

By marvellous contrast, social network Faceparty became so irritated with some of its users last week that it "shut the whole site down and fucked off to the zoo". The free-to-use site had promised some "free cool tools" for anyone who uploaded pictures of themselves in fancy dress; when said "tools" hadn't appeared after a few days, site members began posting abusive messages. "I'm going to trading standards about this," wrote one, while another apparently commenced legal action. Faceparty's response – archived by The Register – was to throw a stupendous hissy fit.

It's astonishing, isn't it, how internet users are so used to getting something for nothing that they'll exhibit righteous fury when they can't access some freebie or other. (Which is, of course, why the likes of the Pirate Bay are so popular, and why the emails they get from record companies are becoming increasingly hysterical.)

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