[p2p-research] Where is P2P in the Pirate Bay, was: Pirate Bay Conviction Analysis from NETTIME list...

Wed Apr 22 06:30:15 CEST 2009

Hi Marco,

Users at the Pirate Bay may have very different motivations, but above all,
they are sharing music, instead of purchasing it and consuming it as a
commodity,

Thus, like you, whatever one may think about the ethics of filesharing
without any return to the makers of music, they are an exemplary
transgressive social practice, that has many p2p aspects, including the
voluntary contribution of placing the mucic, the participatory process of
managing the sharing through filesharing networks, and the universal
availability of the resulting music commons.

Thus, rather than imprison people for sharing, it is incumbent on
policymakers, and on ourselves, to push for solutions like the collective
licensing, which insure that both sharing can occur, and artists can make a
living.

So the bad guys in this affair are not the Pirate Bay, but those social
forces which impede a solutoin which can marry both sharing (which can no
longer be stopped) and the sustainability of artists,

Here's an approach, that like you (and me) recognize the dark side of
filesharing (i.e. sharing without caring),

see
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-emergence-of-the-post-piratical-era/2009/04/27

« The Renaissance of New
Communalism<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-renaissance-of-new-communalism/2009/04/22>

The emergence of the post-piratical
era<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-emergence-of-the-post-piratical-era/2009/04/27>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]Michel Bauwens
27th April 2009

 Since some ten years now, a strong mentality has been established among the
world’s Internet users which expects unregulated duplication to be the
natural mode of the network. And human mentality is something which tends to
be hard to change.

Probably the best analysis of the consequences of the Pirate Bay trial,
which appeared in the Liquid Culture
blog<http://liquidculture.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/the-pirate-bay-the-verdict-marks-the-beginning-of-the-post-piratical/>
:

(excerpts below, with subtitles of our own)

*1. Filesharing will continue*

*“We are entering a “post-piratical” decade. Unregulated file-sharing is a
condition, no exception.*

*We have seen regular attacks against the “pirates”. Serious accusations,
severe measures. Even convictions, such as this one. But the effect is
fleeting. Some now point to the implementation of laws like IPRED and swear
that “downloading is going down”. If only it were that simple. Also this
effect is most likely transient.*

*Some people will now point to the conviction and say that it will now be
more dangerous to start and run file-sharing sites in countries like Sweden.
But The Pirate Bay’s servers are abroad (no-one, not even the site
administrators know where the servers are), and the operation of such a site
may be shared by hundreds of individuals. At the same time, millions of
individuals keep file-sharing out of habit, completely unhindered. We will
all remember the spectacle that this trial was, but real long-term
consequences for ordinary people’s morality of file sharing are not likely.*

*We have witnessed a collective learning process: While older generations
have learned about how practical file-sharing comes about, we have all come
to get used the latent conflict that seems inherent to these days and times.
We know it will be like this, for a while now. A seemingly insoluble
situation, where the parties are talking completely different languages and
have completely different moral points of view. Again, a condition.*

*Alongside the current urgency of the impending cluster of regulatory laws
on the horizon, we will now see the usual exchange among bloggers and online
activists and a close scrutiny of the verdict. But since the verdict will be
appealed anyway, the overall attitude is one of irresoluteness. A feeling
that no really disastrous ruling has happened here and now, because too many
uncontrollable, indefinable factors surround this phenomenon in general.*

*The verdict may result in discouraging some people from any grander plans
to launch Pirate Bay-inspired sites in the near future. But this is more
about a possible lack of courage and imagination among hackers and net
activists, which actually existed long before The Pirate Bay was the target
of legal action. And, as I said, the servers can be put anywhere.*

*File-sharing in general will continue. The legal manoeuvres against it will
continue. Despite the gravity and legal weight behind it, this ruling will
most likely only make some shallow changes, while the main infrastructure
will not change very much at all. One could therefore call attacks such as
these merely “symbolic,” but that is to somewhat lessen them: Ordinary
citizens after all risk going to prison.”*

*2. The Pirate Bay is just one of the actors of the networks*

*“Although a large part of the unregulated copying is channelled through
them, it is a great mistake to believe that The Pirate Bay in any way would
be absolute leader of piracy for all foreseeable future, seducing the young
and dominating the entire Internet.*

*What the verdict has rather made people realize are the concrete, material
conditions for their activities. Practical file-sharing, as Peter Sunde and
co. were demonstrating for the slightly older crowd in the courtroom, is not
a one-dimensional activity with only one transmitter, one receiver and a
clear, hierarchical chain of command.*

*It is an ever-changing, intuitive entity, where relatively modest efforts
may contribute to major strings of events. An important lesson we have all
learned during this trial is about the organizational principles of networks
and how this very rarely is about only one actor who alone would carry the
entire responsibility.”*

*3. The dark side of pirate culture: sharing without caring*

*“It is important to see that also the file-sharing proponents’ arguments
have dark sides. A dangerous development would be if a combination of
technological determinism, nihilism and individualism precipitated a
contempt for those who do not understand the Internet, an attitude that says
that whoever “missing the train” only has him- or herself to blame. A gap
between those who know what RAR, torrents and hash tables are and those who
lack the audacity and the knowledge to veer outside of the poorer, narrower,
strictly commercially sanctioned services.*

*Another dangerous development would be if the file-sharing laissez faire
mentality led to a similarly nihilistic attitude to culture, where an
entirely opportunistic consumption is allowed, without inhibitions and any
sense of obligations to the mother culture at large. A completely solitary
individual, enjoying the fruits of the collective without giving anything
back. Sharing without caring.”*

*4. The Post-piratical condition*

*A. The enforcers*

*“The major issue of whether unrestricted file-sharing’s can carry on or not
would ultimately be resolved by the technical development, which prohibits
an even stricter regulation, since that seems to lead us into an outright
surveillance society. This is a society that nobody wants, not even old
studio musicians made redundant when Phil Collins’s studio productions are
slimmed down. In the real post-piratical condition, the digital reformation
is completed, and the new landscape is accepted. Disagreement still exists,
but there is a consensus on the fundamental technological issues. People
have learned to live with one another. In the post-piratical condition, the
market economy is working. The cultural industries sell things that
consumers want to pay for. But in new ways than before.*

*So far, this true post-piratical scenario is just an illusion. Silently, a
new suit is sewn. The thread circles the entire globe, contained by the
global copyright laws. The actual suit is the stifling one which constitutes
“the second enclosure movement” which is set up to restrict the freedom of
information.”*

*B. The p2p rights advocates*

At the same time, there is a counterweight to all this, constituted by those
who are trying to maintain what they see as the right to free copying. The
risk is that we will see an increasingly intense trench war, as the
repressive actions of the state and the copyright industry provoke the more
stubborn advocates of file sharing to become even more radical.

*Those who advocate regulation of the Internet from outside are those who
have no trust in the user and believe that man’s unbridled lust, when set
free, only creates misery. Those who are currently called “pirates” are
those who defend the network architecture as it is today: seemingly anarchic
and based on self-regulation. Their attitude to the network is rather based
on trust in the network user and a strong reluctance towards curbing the
agency of the masses.*

It would be unfortunate if the distrust of the previous group would once
again get the upper hand. It has happened far too many times before in
history.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:47 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 18:57:54 PM -0500, Ryan Lanham wrote:
>
> > Seen from  an Asian perspective,  the criminalising campaigns  lead by
> > Western  business  interests  represent   a  worrying  threat  to  the
> > planetary opening  that "peer to peer" cultures  and practices provide
> > for developing countries.
>
> I really have to ask: what the heck there is of "peer to peer" in the
> Pirate Bay or in the larger file sharing community, besides the mere
> **technical** protocol used to download and redistribute the files?
>
> I'm not saying that those people are criminals, nor am I defending the
> current copyright system or the corporations which abuse of it.
>
> But I find very, very little overlap between that and P2P as in "P2P
> production", "P2P cultural exchange", "commons-based peer production
> and knowledge exchange," and most of what is written at
> http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives starting
> from the "our aims" box, or at
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Characteristics_of_P2P
>
> That is all stuff about being equals, about everybody being a
> producer, etc...
>
> 99.99% of the people who share the overwhelming majority of the music,
> video and proprietary software found at Pirate Bay, Kazaa, Emule or
> whatever else is trendy these days, don't even know that a
> p2pfoundation.net website exists, don't really care about what it
> advocates, and never remix or make any derivative work of what they
> put into, or get from those networks.
>
> They are passive and pretty happy with being passive. They put or get
> into the network, AS IS, what SOMEBODY ELSE produced (mostly chosing
> commercial manure, mass produced by large corporations). They don't
> even really care about each other, besides sharing their IP numbers so
> they can all download faster. More exactly: they may very well be all
> wonderful, caring people who give every penny they earn and every
> minute of their time to help other human beings, but they certainly
> don't need what happens on Pirate Bay and similar to accomplish that
> goal.
>
> So, again, I am NOT saying that the current copyright system is good
> or that the users of file sharing networks are bad people. But I
> remain quite baffled whenever I see what happens and is advocated on
> lists like this one, or at p2pfoundation.net... called and considered
> the same thing as what happens at Pirate Bay. Really.
>
> Marco Fioretti
> http://mfioretti.com
> --
> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>

-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090422/ca80c82e/attachment.html>