Blog @ Digital Bazaar

The Pirate Bay and Building an Equitable Culture

The latest site to gain the full attention and ire of the RIAA, MPAA, and copyright holders worldwide is The Pirate Bay (TPB). Or rather, it was the Pirate Bay until their owners were raided, sued, tried and sentenced earlier this month. The Pirate Bay is the latest link in a long chain of peer-to-peer companies that have met their end at the hands of international copyright law. It is also the target of a post-litigation buy-out attempt by a company who wants to monetize the over 25 million community members of TPB.

Global Gaming Factory X AB, a publicly traded Swedish company, has put forth an offer to purchase The Pirate Bay and all of its assets in a bid to move the site toward legitimacy. In essence, the goal was to charge the community to access content on the network and in return for sharing their bandwidth and storage, the new Pirate Bay would reduce the monthly subscription fee based on the amount you contributed. An interesting plan, but the world has seen this before.

First, there was Napster, and then Kazaa and now with The Pirate Bay. Recent history has demonstrated what happens to P2P companies that attempt to migrate to for-pay. Going legit is a desirable goal, especially for those who make a living from selling their intellectual works, but migrating these types of communities to legitimacy has always failed.

There is a lesson in this chain of events that all of us can learn to appreciate. These legitimization attempts fail at times due to mis-management, technology, or lack of proper funding. However, even if they are to succeed in the previously stated areas, they are still doomed to fail because of the culture involved in the change…

1 Comment

1. An “equitable culture” is not one where some idiot in a suit 10,000 miles away can not dictate what you can do with your own physical property. I own my computer, I own my hard disks, I own my NIC and my router; to say that I may be limited in the way I use those objects is to say that some idiot has some claim to my property. It also implies that the same idiot has a right to spy on me in order to enforce this right he claims. We must at some point in time realize how ridiculous and contradictory this concept of intellectual monopoly is and give it up.

   When that happens we’ll still have supply in the form of ample artists wanting to produce cultural works and demand in the form of billions of people who want to consume cultural works. There will therefore arise a system in which this supply and demand will balance with voluntary exchange; it is a natural ecological/economic function that cannot be defeated or supplemented by force, only interfered with. The market right now is essentially facing a narrow pipe problem, where supply is nearly infinite and demand is very large, but the channels of acceptable exchange are very small. That narrow pipe is bound to spring leaks, and there aren’t enough lawyers-cum-plumbers in the world to patch them. Get used to it.

   Comment by Freememe — September 8, 2009 #

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