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

[Michel Bauwens]

In countries in the South, including Thailand,

if music, movies, educational textbooks, software, etc.. where not available
through filesharing or through commercial piracy for that matter, that would
mean that the majority of the population here, say 70% would not have any
access to it

in this context, as Andy suggest, piracy is an inevitable  by-product of the
rent-seeking monopolies,

hence, filesharing, is ethically superior to commercial piracy, because
there is no direct personal benefit on the back of those that produce the
value, i.e. the artists

Defending the Pirate Bay, and the sharing practices of youth worldwide, and
attacking and critiquing the rent-monopolists, seem more sensible to me ,
than attacking the filesharing youth, because they're motives, i.e using and
sharing culture without pay-back, are not 'pure'. Moreover, research
suggests that the more active filesharers also purchase most music (like
active library patrons), and therefore, though there is no direct
reciprocity, as a whole, artists still benefit.

Michel

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Point taken, BUT...
>
> The p2p nature of the technology infrastructure is crucial to the
> resilience to repression, and also, isn't the development of technologies in
> this area usually p2p among designers as well?
>
> I wonder how passive the use is; I actually doubt that:
> "99.99% of the people... never remix or make any derivative work of what
> they put into, or get from those networks."
> is true, from the scale of movie-videos (such as "AMVs") put to music on
> YouTube and similar sites; and people using commercial music in their home
> videos etc - I think this is actually more common than reposting commercial
> content unedited.  I'm inclined to think having things available in copiable
> format tempts people to use them in creative ways, especially when the tools
> to use them are also readily available.
>
> Something following from the Filipino argument - I thought it was very
> interesting to see this issue put in a North-South perspective.  Now I think
> about it, that Argentine case and the recent Brazilian law aside, all the
> really nasty copyright stuff seems to happen in the North.  Countries in
> Asia which I'd expect to be quite repressive (China, Malaysia, Singapore,
> Hong Kong) seem to be surprisingly inactive on copyright matters, at least
> if measured by the amount of dodgy stuff that's exported from or hosted
> there.  I was recently told by an Indian student that India doesn't have
> intellectual property laws except for the film industry.  Not sure if it's
> true, but they do produce and distribute generic versions of drugs which are
> patented in the North.  There was a case back in January of an Indian ship
> exporting drugs to Brazil being seized in Holland, even though the generics
> on board were permitted in both India and Brazil.  There's also been a
> takeoff of OS/FS systems in some Southern countries (Brazil, Venezuela,
> South Africa have all officially embraced Linux variants, Nigeria is
> strongly hooked up with the One Laptop Per Child project).
>
> Makes me wonder if there could be a redistribution of global power on this
> basis - parts of the South become successful based on not impeding flows of
> symbols, signs and data, while the North cuts off its own development
> through copyright rent-extraction.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
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