Starting of a class talking about copyright, I thought it apropos to post about everyone’s favorite cyberpirates, The Pirate Bay. In case you’ve no idea what The Pirate Bay is (hi, mom!) check out the Wikipedia entry, go right to their website, or check out this fancy little slide show (I tried to get all fancy and embed this slide show, but my embedding skills are sub par, so here’s the distinctly web 1.0 way of sharing this).
Without getting too specific, TPB has been facing a lot of legal heat recently as the place where organizations like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to pin their arguments against piracy via bit torrents. Depending on who you ask, it’s been going less than smoothly for TPB, so it seems that they’re starting to explore alternatives. In addition to alternatives like selling the domain name, the leaders of TPB are encouraging their fellow pirates to keep on copying, so they’re promoting a new kind of way of bit torrenting. One might even say the future of bit torrent.
Check out the slide show for the best description of what “the future of bit torrent” is, but essentially what it does it distribute the list of files (the tracker) on to everyone’s computer. Instead of a single place where the whole list is kept, it’s not spread out across the network. This new development is particularly interesting in a few ways. First, it’s a great example of how it’s going to be really difficult for the legal system to stay ahead of technology. Right now, the legal system is trying to blame the TPB founders for assisting copyright infringement because they are the administrators of a list of files that can be pirated. Even if it’s decided that TPB is culpable, that’s really only going to effect the three founders. Once this list goes away, and the entire torrent tracking system becomes decentralized, it takes away any one group to target.
This is also an interesting to me because it highlights how technical understanding internet piracy is. Many (most?) of our parents couldn’t tell you the first thing about torrenting, never mind the underlying technical understanding of how the files are saved and reconstituted. Unfortunately, people from our parent’s generation, and older, are the ones who are ultimately responsible for creating the laws that affect copyright laws. This is unfortunate not because old people are in charge, but because our legislators haven’t had the exposure to these technologies from a young age so as to develop a deep understanding, and despite the importance of the issue, legislators just don’t have time to become experts in such a technical topic. This leads to situations where people can be influenced by “authority” or just by convincing but misleading arguments. I don’t know what the answer is here, but it’s very concerning to me to see the divide between the decision makers and the masses.
Thoughts on how to bridge this divide in a constructive manner?
Some Rights Reserved
Dylan,
I agree with you that it is unfortunate that so often we find younger generations’ progress impeded by older authorities. The fact is as you say, our parents and elder authorities for the most part don’t understand 95% of modern technology. Just look at Sumner Redstone, 82 year old head of Viacom, who is actively involved in many law suits with google owned Youtube (for those not familiar…kudos to wikipedia…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom#Copyright_complaints_against_YouTube.) He can hardly open and send emails let alone download the latest Mars Volta album.
Despite this obvious technological ignorance, the fact remains that these are the men and women with the money and the power. They all make millions upon millions of dollars year by year by staying set in their ways–why would they want to give that up?
Bridging the divide, to me at least, seems one that will have to wait until men like Sumner pass on. We need fresh faces and ideas that will only come as generations who are tech savvy dominate the positions of wealth and power in this country.
Greg-
Greg,
The hitch I see with your idea about waiting “until men like Sumner pass on” is that Sumner really isn’t all that important in this debate by himself. This is not simply lawsuits and copyright claims made by the technologically ignorant. On the contrary, I fully believe that the heads of major institutions like Sumner understand full well what they are doing and creating. And “Institution” is exactly what Sumner is making out of his company. His goals now reach beyond his lifetime and there are indeed more in his line to replace him.
This is not to demonize Viacom, much as I dislike their actions, but merely to point out that this is not a waiting game. Yes, we may be impeded by older authorities, but don’t let that be an excuse for not trying to build and exercise what power you do have. One important place you have power is with one of the older authorities in your life, your parents.
Getting back to the main topic, though, I appreciate a lot of the work that TPB has done and I believe that the website was actually set to be sold in August, but I’m not sure what became of that. It’s true that further decentralization will make it harder for the law to keep pace, and maybe that will encourage the private sector to get more involved with digital distribution and payment schemes, since that’s really the long-term solution anyway. I have been much more interested, recently, in the new IPREDator service that TPB has been developing that keeps data transfers between users annonymous.
Anyway, I think TPB’s case is still under appeal, but I’ll be interested to see how it ends up.
-Dave
Great points — I’m really looking forward to exploring how generational perspectives on political issues influence law. Take, for example, the fact that most of the people who object to gay marriage are over 35.
To the extent that laws reflect society’s norms, it seems difficult for our legal system to adjust quick enough to keep up with the pace. And technology’s speed merely exacerbates that.
Thanks for the post, Dylan!
Obviously technology will always speed past the law. Technology moves in nano-seconds and law moves on decades.
But do you really sympathize with TPB? I fully understand that there are a number of problems with copyright law: noncommercial (and maybe commercial) remixing and parody should be allowed and the current copyright term is too long.
However, we need to draw the line somewhere. Blatantly copying, distributing, or enabling distribution of creative works without permission and with the *intent* to personally enjoy the work seems to cross the line.
TPB clearly wants to pirate creative works to avoid paying for it. They aren’t arguing for creative freedoms. Their arguments are solely economic: they don’t want to pay for creative works.
Speed,
That’s not really true concerning TPB. Their arguments are not economic at all, but what they argue is not exactly creative freedoms, or at least not directly. If you look at the other creations of The Pirate Bay such as Baywords and IPREDator, you’ll notice are aimed at protecting the power of the user through total annonymity and freedom of distribution of information. There is certainly an economic element to be had in their arguments but TPB has no driving principle about simply getting free content.
Fully 70% of all content downloaded through TPB’s torrent tracker is completely legal. And even for the remaining 30%, one can not be certain that a person who obtains an illegal copy will not purchase a legal one as well. TPB is not opposed to compensating authors, indeed with the proposed sale came vague rumblings of compensating rights-owners.
And the real devil here is right in what you said about “enabling distribution of creative works without permission and with the ‘intent’ to personally enjoy the work seems to cross the line.” Many different things on the internet “enable distribution of creative works without permission.” Search engines are one such tool, as are CD burning software, Torrenting and P2P programs and services, and even IM chat clients. However, not all people pirate the work for “personal enjoyment” either. Some pirate to sell it illegally, some to review it to see if it’s worth buying, some to re-distribute the work to a new and unserved audience as with Anime fan-subbing in multiple languages.
Overally, though, I’d like you to remember that TPB is just a new method of distribution of content as was radio, and television, and VCRs, and CDs, etc. Just because content is available online doesn’t mean people pay for it elsewhere as well (I pay for FiOS TV). Eventually people may come to prefer many of the advantages that digital distribution has brought, but by that point many common systems of compensation will have grown and evolved.
-Dave
With respect to the 70%-legal-downloads from TPB — when everyone at CC heard that, our eyes nearly popped out of our heads. We tried to confirm it, but there doesn’t seem to be an actual source other than the TPB themselves, which obviously had an interest in appearing legitimate.
Facts aside, I think the biggest problem TPB is that they lack a ideological framework outside nihilism and crypto-punk. On top of that, they don’t really seem to have a good agenda for reform.
The Pirate Party, however, seems to be interested in promoting non-commercial sharing and the dissolution of copyright for software. Which has some interesting implications for Linux (more on that later).
But the Pirate Bay folks seem to just want to provoke people and let other initiatives pick up the pieces.
This interview with Sunde of TPB at the Open Video Conference is really worth watching:
http://openvideoalliance.org/2009/06/ovc-interview-with-pirate-bays-peter-sunde-on-boing-boing/
Good comments!
I think it’d be a bit much to expect a group of forum trolls with a good torrent tracker to have an ideological framework. It will always be their style to simply be provocative, but that’s a needed role in and of itself. They provide the role of the deviant that stretches or breaks the boundaries so that future cases and discussions can be had. Their job is to make waves, not to tame them.
It’s worth noting, though, the the proceeds of the propsed sale were supposed to all be going to a political organization like The Pirate Party in order to fight out battles caused by people like TPB in the public and legislative realms.
Also, technology-wise, I am a bit skeptical that a completely decentralized file sharing service will materialize. Many groups have been claiming decentralized services for years but they have never delivered. Remember, decentralization was one of the large gimmicks of P2P.
Dylan,
Thanks for posting this! Your point about the older generation making decisions for the more technologically-savvy younger generation is really interesting. There is certainly a difference between the older generations’ understanding of topics like these and our own.
Unfortunately, I think it’s just a cycle that will continue for awhile. The truth is that younger people will probably always be coming up with more advanced technology, and the older people will always be in charge.
I know we now view people like Sumner Redstone (see Greg’s post) as the unintelligible, overbearing grandpas, but I’m curious to see how we’ll react to future younguns’ when we’re Sumner’s age. Just a thought!
-Elena
@All – I think it’s interesting to address this issue as a generational one, but it’s probably much easier to view the opposition as old&stuffy simply because we’re the embodiment of the “technologically-savvy younger generation.” This is not to say that the age gap doesn’t exist when it comes to technology/file-sharing/etc, but rather to point out that there are plenty of now-middle-aged early adopters who have been championing copyright reform since we were in grade school (take Barlow and Lessig, for example). Sure, these people aren’t necessarily the ones dictating our laws, but they’ve definitely influenced the way society views copyright and free culture in general (i.e. making it possible for us to even be taking this course).
Re: TPB, I agree that they seem to lack any solid ideological framework. After listening to the interview with Sunde and reading about his confrontational strategy in the NYT piece ( http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/09/12/12gigaom-the-pirate-bay-buyer-delisted-founder-talks-strat-83679.html ), Sunde comes off as somewhat smug. He asserts that piracy has everything to do with “democracy” and “freedom of speech,” which he equates with the freedom to share and the free exchange of cultural ideas – though he doesn’t elaborate further on why or how he believes these concepts are related. As the NYT points out, “some of [Sunde's] attempts to contextualize piracy didn’t really make any sense. (Copying is evolution? Don’t tell that to Darwin, or any biologist, for that matter.)”
Fred mentioned that TPB folks, lacking any real plan for reform, “just want to provoke people and let other initiatives pick up the pieces.” While this so-called strategy may sound childish and selfish, in many ways it establishes the grounds for debate (from which actual reform can eventually emerge). After all, we’re discussing the prominence of TPB case in this blog right now. By acting radically with neither a finance nor reform plan, TPB is also raising awareness of piracy and copyright law. I think the NYT best summarized Sunde’s point:
“‘If you go to the extreme, people have to go your way,’ Sunde told the audience at iWeek, adding that ‘it doesn’t really matter’ whether you actually believe in these radical positions or not. Play the bad guy successfully enough, he said, and you open up all kinds of doors for startups (like Spotify) to establish themselves as the good guys and operate services that the industry would have never agreed to in the first place.”
Thanks for the post, Dylan!
@ninanyc:
“He asserts that piracy has everything to do with “democracy” and “freedom of speech,” which he equates with the freedom to share and the free exchange of cultural ideas – though he doesn’t elaborate further on why or how he believes these concepts are related. As the NYT points out, “some of [Sunde's] attempts to contextualize piracy didn’t really make any sense. (Copying is evolution? Don’t tell that to Darwin, or any biologist, for that matter.)’”
Well, one way they are certainly related is in how we learn. Most of the people I knew in High School that went on to college for some sort of artistic major started by copying, pasting, and remaking copyrighted materials. They trace or attempt to mimic copyrighted pictures, they create mash-ups of clips from their favorite movies or TV shows, and in each of these cases they are pirating something in order to create and express themselves in a new way.
In fact, I think the bit about “copying is evolution” is fairly straightforward when you’re not trapped in the unimportant details, and emblematic of the difficulties of explaining cultural creation and why the ability to borrow and expand on older cultural creations is important. Evolution occurs not just with new genetic material, but also by copying and reusing old material that may or may not have worked for previous life-forms, and this is the same with creative work: it combines old work in new ways, adding something else to it in the process and creating something new. Rip, Mix, and Burn, as it were.
I did really appreciate that quote from the NYT article, though. That is indeed a great summary of TPB.
-Dave
I too think the NYT misses the point on Sunde’s “copying is evolution” quote, and I’m not sure Darwin would really object.
Evolution happens because of errors in copying DNA, so in a sense, evolution requires copying.
But I’m not even sure Sunde meant it on that level, he likely just means that “if you don’t allow copying, you won’t evolve.”