The circle of copyrights, copy protection, and cracking has fascinated me
since the 1980s, when software used to be sold on copy protected floppy disks
you had to boot to use. The world and the media war has evolved a lot since
then, although the same underlying principles on both sides remain unchanged.

I am fascinated by the story of The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is a torrent
tracking web site. It's approximately the 100th most popular web site on the
Internet. It is headquartered in Sweden, although the servers that the site
runs from are located in several different countries, including Thailand,
Russia, and Belgium.

What's unusual about it is that it's been around for a long time, as these
things go. The usual cycle is for a web site like this to cave in to legal
threats after a year or two and shut down. Then everybody moves on to some
other place, which in turn dies out in a year or two. To a lesser extent,
technologies go the same way.

But The Pirate Bay has been unusually resilient, and it's not that the powers
that be haven't noticed. On the contrary, TPB has been inundated with
cease-and-desist letters from corporations, which the owners of the site
proudly publish and mock for their readers. (Just visit the "legal threats"
link from their main page.)

A couple of years ago, TPB was subject to a police raid. The TPB folks alleged
that the raid was the result of pressure from U.S. government officials and the
MPAA. Gagillions of equipment was confiscated, although the owners of the site
were only held briefly for questioning. The net result of the raid was that
The Pirate Bay web site went down for three days. After the raid, the MPAA
issued a press release proclaiming a great victory, and then the site was back
up and running again.

More recently, the four guys behind TPB were arrested and tried in a Swedish
court for "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws." A day
into the trial, the prosecution dropped the charges of "assisting copyright
infringement," keeping only the charges of "assisting making available," which
is a distinction I don't quite understand but seems to be rooted in the nature
of BitTorrent technology. At any rate, last Friday a guilty verdict came in
for all four, and they are now fined almost a million dollars each and
sentenced to a year in jail. That's not final. In Sweden, the charges don't
take effect until all appeals have been processed. There are two higher
courts that the defendants can appeal to. If they'd won, the prosecution would
certainly have appealed, so this case was going to go up the chain anyway.

The aftermath fascinates me. On file sharing blogs and stuff, the outcry is
loud and long. There are claims that the judge was bought. There are defiant
resolutions about never buying movies or music from media companies again.
(Which is hilarious: aren't these the people NOT buying them in the first
place?) Many of the commenters don't have a shred of legal sense. One said,
hey, they do their year in jail, and then they can't be tried again for the
same crime! So The Pirate Bay will live on! Er, no, dude, each *instance*
of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright law" is a separate
crime. Otherwise someone convicted of armed robbery would get future armed
robberies for free. But never mind.

As for the four owners of The Pirate Bay, the attitude is of resilient
defiance. One of them has asked fans, who have sent anonymous donations to
help with the fines, to stop sending him money -- because they are refusing
to pay any fines whatsoever. Furthermore, the site has not suffered any
downtime at all. Throughout the trial, the TPB crew have been saying that no
matter how it turns out, the site will remain up. It's easy to believe them,
considering how redundant and international the site's server network is.

Why does this story intrigue me so? On the surface of it, I don't have a
huge vested interest in the outcome. I cannot rouse much of any sympathy for
EITHER side. Copyright infringement is wrong, and copyright holders are
legally and ethically entitled to sell or license their content in whatever
manner they see fit, be that manner fair or exploitative to the consumer.
Whether the TPB crew are legally guilty of anything (I'm no expert on the
nuances of Swedish or international copyright law), they are certainly not
ethically in the clear.

On the other hand, the media companies, especially in the last several years,
have been cheap bullies, plain and simple, going completely overboard with
restrictions on what private citizens can't do with what they've been sold,
making lawsuits, grossly exaggerating the estimates of revenues lost to piracy
for the purpose of political power, and regularly screw over the creators of
the content they license and sell. (That writer's strike from a year ago?
The studios basically won that.)

The other side of the coin is that copyright law is far too strict in the U.S.
(I don't know about internationally.) Copyrights are good in that they protect
content creators, but too much copyright stifles creativity. If society is to
achieve its maximum potential as a free-flowing exchange of ideas, people have
to be able to build off other people's work. Ideas are never created in a
vacuum. Every intellectual creation was born out of other people's creations.
Thus, what is best for the individual is not necessarily best for society as a
whole. As a rule, I tend to favor individuals' rights over society's rights,
but there is still a balance that should be struck. Artists must have a
financial incentive to create, plus the freedom to explore ideas as much as
possible. Author's life plus 75 years, which is currently how long a copyright
lasts, is absurd. And it's probably worse than that. Every time some big
moneymaking property gets near to falling into the public domain, mysteriously
the law changes to extend the copyright term. Insidious.

With regard to the rights of private citizens, is it really sensible for a
media company to tell you you can't have a personal backup of the content you
purchase? DVDs/CDs are cheap enough as they are. The smallest scratch can
render the whole disk unusable, in which case you might as well have set fire
to the money you spent on it. More ambiguously, are the modern equivalent of
mix tapes really such a huge threat to the survival of recording studios?

DRM is outright oppressive. Basically, you buy a song, and then you need to
get permission every time you want to play it, or put it somewhere. Upgrade
your computer too many times, and you won't be recognized as you anymore.
Might as well toss that song in the recycle bin. Admittedly, if a consumer
AGREES to a purchase encumbered by DRM, understanding the limitations, then
that's his own fault. But when the media companies join forces (which is what
the RIAA is; the MPAA is the equivalent for movie studios) to enforce
constraints on the consumer, isn't this EXACTLY like workers' unions, only the
other way around? Yes, it is (and should be) legally permissible for
corporations to form alliances, but there needs to be a way for consumers
to fight back.

The clincher is that piracy is easy to throttle: Admittedly, you can't stop
it completely, but if you want to reduce it, you DON'T encumber media with
copy protection, and you don't throw around lawsuits and lobby for stricter
laws. It's counterproductive. Technical challenges merely whet the appetite
of a technology enthusiast fighting for his rights as a consumer. The irony
is that software companies LEARNED THIS ALREADY in the 1980s. They figured
out that once copy protection got too good, sales dropped off. More and more
software started being sold without copy protection, simply because it made
good business sense to do so.

All you have to do to stem piracy is this: Treat your customers fairly.
Make your content available and affordable. By and large, people prefer to do
the legal thing. Most people will only turn to piracy when they feel the
alternative is to let themselves be screwed over. The record companies got
slammed by piracy because they wanted you to spend $20 on a music album (when
introductory prices for CDs were higher than for tapes, the promise was that
the price point would come down once more people adopted the new technology,
but prices stayed where they were) even if you only wanted a single song.
After years of unsuccessfully fighting online downloads, iTunes saved the
industry and revitalized Apple in a single stroke. It wasn't the full answer:
iTunes was laden with DRM and clunky software, but it was such a huge step in
the right direction that it was a good long while before consumers started
seeing iTunes as evil. And now iTunes is going DRM-free, another incredibly
correct decision.

That, however, is an easier thing to say than to enact. The internationality
of the Internet muddies the picture on both sides. Making content available
at reasonable prices is much easier to do within a nation than internationally,
when you're up against not just differing legal environments but wholly
different cultures. Movie studios can't do a lot to stem piracy in China,
because the primary impetus for it is the Chinese government preventing legal
availability. Most American movies aren't allowed a legal release in China.
And so, obviously, the black market is booming -- to the point where now it's
not just a legal matter but a cultural one as well.

Back to The Pirate Bay. Can it be stopped? I highly doubt it. I don't know
how it *would* be shut down, since it's so international. All you can do is
remove the reason for people to go there and support the site in the first
place.

So who do I root for in this case? The side with the ethical rights is also
the side screwing over honest consumers. But that doesn't mean it's okay to
steal intellectual property, which also stifles creativity and robs artists.
It's a contentious area, and I'm sure I'll be making enemies of both sides by
not committing to either one. But I've heard a lot of rants and raves from
both sides, and I am convinced that the more loyally committed one is to one
side or the other, the less that person truly understands the issues at hand.