Piracy, Ahoy

Pirates: 3,500,000 (Pirate Bay’s registered users) Courts: 4 (Pirate Bay’s hosts)

The Pirate Bay trial verdict is in, and it doesn’t look good for the pirates. If you haven't been following the Pirate Bay trial, allow me to provide you with some background via links:

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

For those “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) followers of this blog, here's a brief summary: Filesharing megasite hosts are tried, found guilty.

What surprises me with the Pirate Bay case is that only the site’s hosts were tried. I’m no tech-xpert, but I imagine there is a way to pursue and prosecute the users of Pirate Bay through the site’s logs or IP history. Now, the penalty the founders face (years in jail, millions of dollars in restitution, etc.) may be enough to discourage other would-be captains of pirate hosting sites; or, bilge rats may see the lack of prosecution of the users as clear waters for further piracy.

My interest is in the particulars. The founders were charged with, according to the first link, “assisting in making copyright content available” by archiving and storing BitTorrent files. It seems to me the real scallywags here are the unprosecuted users: they are the ones consuming and using the files; the founders were just the pirates who sorted the cove’s treasure, not the ones who thieved it. A mobster’s crooked accountant is as guilty as the mobster, I guess.

I’ve always imagined the underground piracy movement was too ethereal, too ubiquitous for any legal action to catch up with the chum buckets involved. Apparently not. While prosecuting four people may seem like a small victory, if doing so sinks the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, perhaps it is the same as bringing down the flagship of a giant armada. Maybe we ought to do the same with one of the renowned Somali pirate ports: take it down.

IP Freely

Modern day pirates aren’t solely from Somalia; they can be found anywhere there is Internet access. Intellectual Property, copyright concerns, and P2P piracy are growing problems. Years ago, Lester Faigley made the analogy that finding information online is like drinking from a fire hose; when information is so bountiful, comes from so many different streams, washes over us in waves, we take it for granted. The drink has numbed our senses to IP issues. Walter Benjamin’s influential “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is an important article to read when pondering ownership; I wonder if the text would be too difficult for my freshmen to read to get them thinking about IP: it would be a great discussion piece.

Most of my students know Napster only from its infamy, not from having actually used it; but that is not to say they don’t use other P2P file sharing software. When it comes to the argument essay assignment, I always have at least one student who wants to write about P2P downloads and the RIAA. They are familiar with the issue, but not knowledgeable about it. The segue would be great: we would talk about the popular “pirates versus ninja” debates which would transition neatly into the movie anti-piracy ads and on to a site like http://www.ninjavideo.net/ where the class could see thievery in action. (I wonder, would showing such a site—not necessarily any of its content, just the site itself—cause legal problems?)

Youku.com, the Japanese YouTube, has far fewer restrictions as to its content: viewers can find shows that have been removed from YouTube for copyright. I don’t know much about international copyright law, but it would be an interesting case study for students to look at. How do different cultures view IP matters? How can IP laws in the states be enforced across the globe? Can they be? What are the ramifications of that enforcement? Intellectual property provides delicious food for thought.