It was inevitable, I guess. This trial has become symbolic, even though its end result is completely irrelevant to the future of file-sharing, bit torrent, and so-called piracy. And now, in the wake of the trial, all kinds of mental dwarves peek out of the woodwork, spreading lies and misconceptions at every turn.
So, even though several thousand other people have already tried to clear these issues up, I’ll do my part and helt propagate these ideas…
1. Illegal file-sharing Is Not Stealing.
Piracy isn’t stealing in the same way crossing a red light isn’t stealing, and rape isn’t murder, and smuggling isn’t fraud. Illegal file-sharing is a crime against copyright law. There’s a huge difference between stealing something which then cannot be bought by someone else (like, for instance, stealing a newspaper - the newspaper is a physical object) and making a copy of a bunch of ones and zeroes. The only effect said copying may have is that someone might earn a bit less money than they would have, had the copy not been made. And that’s very hard to prove.
“Piracy” isn’t stealing, and no amout of jibber-jabber about car theft or other flawed analogies won’t change that.
2. There is no proof that file-sharing is responsible for people buying less music.
In fact, the music business is growing. What they’re gnawing their eyes out about is that they aren’t growing as fast as they used to. The idea that people nowadays make more informed decisions regarding their crappy products is apparently completely fucking impossible for them to wrap their tiny heads around. Statistics show that the areas in the world where illegal filesharing is more common also have more legal purchases of music.
The music business as we know it is dying. Not because of illegal file-sharing, but because the whole industry has become a big, bloated dinosaur which has survided its own business models. They are outdated. Which brings me to the next point…
3. We do not need large media companies.
In modern times, the large media corporations have grown, and absorbed smaller companies to the point where they are so large and bloated that they become utterly incapable of the quick changes needed to keep up with modern society. Their recent attempts at establishing online presences are all variations on the theme “too little, too late”: Their interfaces are clunky, their prices too high, their DRM to fucked-up, etc etc.
So; the large media companies will crumble and fall, their empires burning like empires always do, in the end. So, will this mean the end of music? Of movies? Of computer games? No, of course not. Many of the best games in history were programmed by people in basements, for no real reason other than “because it’s fun”. Some of my best experiences with music has been with local, small, basement-type bands. They have the creativity, the energy, the guts to do theit own thing.
Today, there are infinite possibilityies to make your voice heard. Internet provides tools for collaboration in virtually any cultural arena, so that basement developers, musicians and amateur movie makers all over the world can pool their resources and make truly inspiring work - without involvement of the big media companies. The whole Open Source movement is a testament to this; and look at YouTube, MySpace, DeviantArt and a myriad more - never in the history of mankind has there been so many producers of culture, and never has their products been more easily accessible. At moments notice, I can find musicians from Argentina, China or wherever - and listen to their music, experience their cultural world with my own ears. And keep in mind we’re still only at the beginning of the on-line cultural revolution.
So yes, the empires will fall. And good riddance, I say.
4. There is no way they will win in the long run.
Technology will always be ahead. If they begin to listen to our private transmissions of data, we will encrypt the data - there are already open source tools very capable of masking your internet presence. The only thing they will succeed in doing is driving crypto-technology into the hands of the average user. Tomorrow’s torrent client will probably send their information completely encrypted by default, so the average user won’t even have to fiddle around any more than he or she has to today.
If the Pirate Bay is shut down, others will take its place. If the founders of Pirate Bay are sent to prison, there are a gazillion others ready to take their place. File sharing is the future of cultural communication, and the laws must be changed to reflext that.
And some minor points related to the specifics of the trial:
The STIM solution won’t work. In fact, STIM is crap. STIM, for you foreign readers (do I have any foreign readers? Fuck knows…), is a central agency for collecting licensing money. If you play music on the radio for your customers at your pizzerie, you need to pay STIM money and they pay the artists. And in one of the suggested solutions to the problem of illegal file sharing is to make it all go though STIM.
This, of course, is crap. STIM means that regardless of what I download or listen to, only certain artists get payed - what I listen to and who gets money aren’t connected. I spend a month listening to nothing but Jefferson Airplane, and all my money go to people like swedish artist Per Gessle. Not one cent goes to Jefferson Airplane. Give me a way to actually pay Jefferson Airplane the money they would’ve earned on my purchasing their CD, and I’ll gladly do so. Problem is, of course, that the artists get virtually no money if I’d buy the CD; just like money used to purchase Elvis records don’t really go to Elvis, but to people profiteering on his corpse.
