On the copyright comments: US law is not law in other countries!
These sites are not illegal in the the countries in which they are hosted. No crime is being committed in the countries where the servers are located.

In the case of the famous "Pirate Bay" it was perfectly legal in Sweden - the site owners had checked with a lawyer.
Then, the US started putting pressure on Sweden to change it's laws. Sweden first refused. The US eventually threatened trade restriction unless the law was changed or re-interpreted to make TPB illegal. Sweden could not risk such economical damaged and complied. The owners of TBP (awesome techies and supporters of free information online) were just sentenced to PRISON!!!

Personally I think that there may be a case for people paying for certain types of entertainment (games and films) online. I don't think it is critical for people to be able to play computer games and watch Hollywood blockbusters. BUT books, software, music and information should be FREE and available to all. Bittorrent makes that possible.

Google pulled out of China over concerns about Censorship.
Now it is going to impose censorship at the request of US commercial interestes.

Quote Originally Posted by Google
“We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose,” Google writes.
Personally I stopped using Google some time ago.