It seems to be a bad time to be a pirate. The nautically-minded ones have been served some harsh justice by the Navy (which, despite my “swishy liberal” opinions on the military I’ve got to admit I felt a little middle American pride at the effectiveness of our “methods of negotiation”) and the content industry swashbucklers have been sentenced to a year of jail time along with some hefty fines. Wired magazine’s blog has had solid coverage of the event throughout, so if you’re interested to hear about it, this is the place to go.
The content industries have applauded it as a victory, but traffic to TPB has substantially increased, they’ve sold bucketloads(not a legitimate economic metric, even in Sweden) of a 6$ IP anonymization service, and membership to Sweden’s Pirate Party, a copyright reform political party, has increased by 50%. All in all, it’s a dubious victory at best. The real victory for the content industries is not that they’ve convinced these four people, but this ruling has (pending appeal) stopped Sweden from becoming a haven for piracy.
For more commentary, check out the “On the Media” post (on bottom right hand corner of the blog).
The Pirate Bay’s message to it’s supporters?
“Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. 
”
Seriously.
Often, we hear commentary about “social media revolution” or the “death of the recorded music industry” and all sorts of lofty figurative language. With so much war imagery I’ve started to picture men in suits and computer programmers charging at each other with swords and axes. Basically Braveheart without kilts. Or Mel Gibson. Anyway, since we’ve starting growing out of killing each other to evoke social change, we’ve begun to apply war imagery on battles that are solely ideological and intellectual (War on drugs, war on poverty, the fight against AIDS, etc.). However even bloodless battles are still battles, and the idea of the young and new rising up against the old and established is truly classic. Nowadays the combatants of an intellectual fight may never see each other, never mind engage in literal battle. However, the the case of piracy, The Pirate Bay trial has pitted pro and anti piracy groups together in the closest thing to real battle we’ll see between these two groups- a legal battle.
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If you liked Steal This Film II, you might want to check out their newer version. There is a lot of overlap between this video and the one we all watched, but it adds some new and interesting content, especially in relation to The Pirate Bay trial.
The Pirate Bay trial, the “Spectacle Trial” or “Spectrial” has ended, leaving us to await a verdict on April 17th (although it’s unlikely that day will be the end of the litigation). Here’s a basic summary of the events of the TPB trial. It’s a link to TorrentFreak, so the lack of bias in the reporting is open for criticism, but as a basic time line of events it’s succinct and level headed.
I began this travelogue thinking about piracy, but was detoured along the way by social media reporting, particularly the use of twitter for real time reporting. While I think the two ideas are related in some ways, I was encouraged by the reading this week as well the comments last week to refocus on the piracy aspects of the trial, as well as try to explore what ramifications the outcome of the spectrial might have in the future.
This is a letter sent to the RIAA from a 22 year old girl being sued for having copyright material on her computer:
“My name is Brittany Kruger. I’m not a criminal. I’m not a tough person. I cry almost every night these days, and I’m scared to death of what is going to happen to me in the future. Most of all I’m not a pirate, I don’t have a peg leg or a hook for a hand, and I don’t raid ships on the high seas looking for booty.I was a regular kid (I may be 22 years old now, but I still rely on my parents for almost everything!). I’ve no real knowledge of the world at this point in life other than how hard it is to establish credit or get a loan.”
Admittedly it’s kind of a sob story, probably publicized to make the RIAA look bad, but at some point it did stem from one girl’s trouble. I think the letter shows something more than just the obvious ridiculousness totally screwing over college kids to make a point, I think it demonstrates a widening generational gap over the definition of property. I think many of us feel conflicted over what exactly we “should” be doing in regards to intellectual property, but the issue is frustratingly complicated by a changing definition of property and well as our own changing personal relationship with purchasing and ownership.
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I haven’t completely sold myself on this idea, but I was thinking about delving into the ongoing trial of torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay. At this point, the trial is moving into it’s second week and it continues to be closely followed by people on both sides of the digital copyright argument. This trial seems to be a landmark case in this field, and professionals and consumers allike are talking about it from different fields, so there seems to be a diversity of paths I would be able to go down.
What do you think, is talking about copyright too big of a topic, even if initially constrained by talking about this trial?
