Music and film industries need to wake up as The Pirate Bay ‘team’ is sentenced and fined

I’m sure this weekend will see a colossal amount of blogs world-wide written about this topic, so I have decided to throw my hat into the ring…

Maybe it is because of the generation I am from and being a middle-class westerner who grew up with computers and internet at home, that it deeply saddens me to see events like Friday’s court-ruling against the people behind The Pirate Bay. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail and were also ordered to pay $4.5m in damages.

Day-to-day activities breach copyright constantly – attaching an image you don’t own to an email is breaching copyright. How many times have you infringed on copyright by copying a CD or mixtape for a friend? Now, in Sweden anyway, it seems that providing a link to a place where you can access copyrighted materials for free is illegal – I just did that four sentences ago. How many times have we send links to Youtube clips containing copyrighted materials to our friends and family? It doesn’t seem to make any sense that the law does not reflect common practice of the majority of society. If the content industry’s wares are failing to keep up with technological developments, then perhaps it is time for them to contemporise their platforms of distribution and compete with the likes of The Pirate Bay. iTunes did it quite successfully by offering a combination of availability, speed, reliability and convenience that the illegal file-sharing platforms cannot keep up with. Draconian measures by the industry seem only to make themselves look bad, because what they are saying is that “YOU ARE IMMORAL. WE ARE RIGHT. YOU ARE WRONG”. Only they have the money to say it and we don’t have the money to reply.

This issue seems to me to have further implications than a nefarious PR message from the content industry. The Pirate Bay is one of the most successful torrent file-sharing websites, which shares the links to copyrighted material and not the host of actual copyrighted files. While they could not be found guilty of distributing copyrighted materials, the Swedish courts have deemed the infrastructure, which enables this activity, to incite breach of copyright. To me this is a very silly move by the Swedish courts, because that’s exactly what Google and Yahoo do too! Would this have implications to go after these guys too? Politically, definitely not. But Google and other search engines’ facilities provide the links to the torrent sites. My internet browser facilitates the use of search engines. My laptop facilitates the use of my browser. Why not sue the whole lot of them? Because that would be absurd! As absurd as the ruling regarding The Pirate Bay? Of course this move by the Motion Picture Association of America to sue The Pirate Bay is also a publicity campaign to send a message to everyone who is professionally involved in file sharing and is yet another appalling display of US cultural and economic imperialism. In 2006, the US threatened to impose trade sanctions on Sweden if the government did not take steps to shut down The Pirate Bay. The pressure from US business to set legal precedent in one of the most liberal countries in the world where copyright is concerned, was publicised by both sides of the argument and has created some interesting theory on the subject.

Lawrence Lessig (founder of the Creative Commons, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and Professer at Stanford Law School and authof of ‘The Future of Ideas’ and ‘Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy’) has an interesting TED talk (below) which more or less summarizes some of the history of music industry’s battle with copyright in the last century. The ideas featured in the talk are summarizing those in his 2008 book ‘Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy‘ (which is a great read by the way). Take a look at the video. I think he highlights quite well some of the absurdities and moral implications that any court ruling in favour of the content industry has.

In his recent thoughts, Lessig has outlined one of the big changes that these technologies have produced. Not the distribution of copyrighted content, but the ability for all of us to create our own content and produce our own materials. This creative desire and love of DIY culture is what brought me to Monster Truck Gallery & Studios (and Blackletter.ie) in the first place and why I still work for Monster Truck for free. Luckily the art world is of little concern to big-business-USA right now, but my equivalents exist in every sector of the arts – perhaps their practices will be stifled by corporate pressures. My motives (and the motives of many of the hundreds of creatives we have worked with at the gallery) are not of financial interest. What we want is free. Now if that cultural shift on larger scale is not a threat to the content industry, I don’t know what is.

Getting back to the issue at hand, if the populous says file sharing is okay, then this old-school PR campaign by the Motion Picture Association of America may very well be a bad move politically. The Sweedish Pirate Party (yes it is actually a political party in Sweden) received a 20% surge in membership in one day after the Pirate Bay trial verdict, and as a result, now has more members than Sweden’s Green Party! The Pirate Bay say they are not going to pay the money. Peter Sunde says: “We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.” Well either way, The Pirate Bay team are probably gonna need some hard cash soon with legal bills and all… so you can buy their t-shirts here.

And if that’s not enough blah blah blah, then you can download the docuemetary about file sharing and it’s political, legal and cultural implications, “Steal This Film 2″ here. Or you can download it by torrent via The Pirate Bay here. It’s free so Sweden can’t come get me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.