| Apr. 17th, 2009 @ 09:48 am Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty. Of Something. They're Pretty Sure. |
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Current Mood:  determined
Current Music: Marilyn Manson - MOBscene
So we finally have an official verdict in the first round of prosecution against The Pirate Bay... or rather the four brave souls willing to play the part of human shields over it.
All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.
"Assisting in making copyright content available." What the hell, I was doing that myself, when I was fourteen, from the cheap computer in my family's dining room, over a free modem connection. Congratulations, Authorities: you've succeeded, after all this pop and circumstance, in royally screwing up the lives of four industrious people with the same charge you would have used to convict me at fourteen for sharing scanned comic books over AOL.
Me, or anyone else, really. It's the vague and pervasive wording on this that really bothers me. Find me someone in modern society who isn't guilty of "assisting in making copyright material available." Go on, I challenge you. Yes, your IPhone counts as entrapment. So does your TiVo, your PC, your XBox, and probably a fax machine.
Over a million dollars in fines each and one year in jail. I doubt the money will even be a problem in a case like this... it'll come form somewhere, these guys aren't stupid and they've had a long time to prepare. And jail time is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I even need to go into how utterly backwards and unproductive that is? No matter what kind of prison circumstances these guys end up in (I really have no idea, either)... it's supposed to what, give them a year in which to build even more hate for the system and plan what they're going to do when they get out? Or give them a year to turn into paranoid, survivalist animals? No matter how I look at it, this counts as complete bullshit. If nothing else, these guys are obviously damned good at what they do, and not likely to appreciate being dicked so hard by The Man. Why not throw them a bone instead and put them to some sort of positive community service. Heal the breach a little, don't make it worse, you fuckin idiots. Cops everywhere are all the same, root out the evil and all that's left will be sunshine and rainbows. Bullshit. Back and white thinking only means that eventually something purple will appear and run your colorblind ass over because you couldn't see it.
So no one accuses me of being an uninformed doomcrier, let me emphasize that this descision actually means very little at this point... it will be appealed and passed hither and yon for years, and of this moment serves very little purpose other than to illustrate the current political climate. I am only glad this is not happening in the US, where the media and political circus would be thirty times the size, and my goddamned tax dollars would be paying for it. Sweden can foot this one.
No, Sirs and Madams, this is not about the judgment, this is about the message being sent. And the message, in this case, is pretty piss-poor and simple for an issue with many thousands of jobs and billions of dollars at stake, not to mention the issues of our creative liberties. And please, let's no one bring up the fact that this isn't technically happening in America, that doesn't matter a bit.
Let us faithful not forget the message being sent by the Pirates, either, and I shall quote verbatim: "Fuck You."
They've made it clear that they consider this to be merely a stage play (and I agree, for what it's worth), and the message they're sending is one of complete defiance. Their system can't be touched, they're willing to go down for it, and they want the world to know this. Personally, I cannot condone this approach... to declare yourself invulnerable on a battlefield is to invite a thousand separate crosshairs to settle upon your very own brow, and you will be unseated, this is the way of things.
Now... this is a tough one for me, a hugely tough one. On the one hand, it's damned hard for an intelligent person to argue that this is a victimless crime and that it's all just The Big Evil Corporations ganging up on little guys (ok, ok, it is that, but that's not my current point). As much as the current media distribution model is horrifyingly corrupt and counterproductive (basically being a giant double-ended dildo tipped with AIDS and battery acid, designed to brutally and profitably rape both the artists and consumers at once from a comfortable, jelly-like middle ground), they do have the right to protect their property, whether it's evil or not, and on many levels, many people who work in these matters every day really are trying to do what's best for everyone... not an easy task in this generation.
I would consider working in copyright law right now being akin to being a knight commander in the French army, showing up outside of Crécy in the summer 1346 at the head of thousand armored knights, and idly wondering what the fuck this tiny mob of unruly English thought they were about to do with all those funny looking sticks they were playing with.
Those longbows are basically Bittorrent and other emerging networks, and I don't think I have to elaborate on who the French knights and nobility are.
The longbow allowed the English to kick the ever-loving barbaric piss out of the French army and nobility, over ten-to-one, and not only won a major battle resoundingly but quite seriously reshaped the way that part of the world worked; militarily, socially, and economically. Little people with better technology have been on the leading edge of nearly every major conflict since.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the elite few in charge to realize that the little people were one hell of a lot easier to control and manipulate than well-fed and well-educated knights and nobles, and us crowing little rebels and pirates out there would do very well to remember this fact. The old guard is changing very slowly in this generation, but it is changing, and when it does, it might be better off if we hadn't gone out of our way to piss the big boys off as much as we possibly could have.
They might have the funny-looking sticks next time, and they might be smart enough to hide them from us until it's too late.
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