International pirates take on Hollywood

This morning, we're reporting live from the Wide World of Digital Rights, a.k.a., the future of your cultural intake. Today we'll be in Sweden, where a website called ThePirateBay.org has decided to thrust the discussion of "what does copyright mean today?" into the limelight following their raid by Swedish police.

The background: US authorities are rumored to have put pressure on Swedish police to shut down and raided the offices of the website ThePirateBay, which is a BitTorrent tracking site. The short explanation of what that means: it's a website that allows people to post torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing. BitTorrent traffic accounts for huge percentages of all Internet traffic these days, because it's one of the most valid ways to transfer large chunks of data. Remember Napster? Child's play, compared to what BitTorrent-based technologies can do.

Needless to say, people in Hollywood and the RIAA are completely freaking out over all this BitTorrent stuff (though Warner Brothers did make the bold move of setting up a BitTorrent pay-for-play deal a month ago), and thus, sites like ThePirateBay are coming under fire.After their site was shut down and servers were seized, they vowed to be back up and running within days. (They were, with the brand new logo above.) But beyond that, they took this moment in the spotlight not just to call attention to their own plight -- they posted a list of civil rights violations committed during the raid -- but to the nature of just what copyright means in the digital age, and how these Draconian lash-outs by governments around the world (at the behest of the MPAA and RIAA) are simply not doing anyone any good.

In an interview this weekend, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party talked about the implications of cultural control by one or few entities, how the Church had been doing this kind of stuff throughout the Dark Ages, where the origins of copyright lie, and why it's important to bring light -- not slap darkness and punishment -- on the technology that allows people to share and spread knowledge and culture:

[...] God have mercy on those who dared to challenge the culture and knowledge monopoly of the Church! They were subjected to the most horrible trials that man could envision at the time. Under no circumstances did the Church allow its citizens to spread information on their own. Whenever it happened, the Church applied its full judicial powers to obstruct, to punish, to harass the guilty ones.

[...]

We are speaking here about the time when the Church went out in its full force and ruled that it was unnecessary for its citizens to learn to read or to write, because the priest could tell them anyway everything they needed to know. The Church understood what it would mean for them to lose their control.

Then came the printing press.

Suddenly there was not only a source of knowledge to learn from, but a number of them. The citizens -- who at this time had started to learn to read -- could take their own part of the knowledge without being sanctioned. The Church went mad. The royal houses went mad. The British Royal Court went as far as to make a law that allowed the printing of books only to those print owners who had a special license from the Royal Court. Only they were allowed to multiply knowledge and culture to the citizens.

This law was called "copyright".

Then a couple of centuries passed, and we got the freedom of press. But everywhere the same old model of communication was still being used: one person talking to the many. And this fact was utilized by the State who introduced the system of "responsible publishers".

And this very thing is undergoing a fundamental change today -- because the Internet does not follow the old model anymore. We not only download culture and knowledge. We upload it to others at the same time. We share files. The knowledge and the culture have amazingly lost their central point of control.