Sweet Sweden: Pirate Bay Lives

I've always loved Northern Europe: socially progressive, aware, clear thinking and proactive. While most Americans haven't got the slightest clue about what RIAA and MPAA have been doing to curtail their access to and control of content, even content they "buy" (lease, rent, get to listen to twice....), the Swedes aren't gonna take this shit lying down.

RIAA has been closing down or responsible for revamping every fileshare site online during the past few years, even stalwart Limewire has taken all the fun out of downloading. Not one significant protest has been launched in response to this... until MPAA messed with Sweden.

Lots of pirate flags waving over there, and it's not for the premiere of Gore Verbinski's sequel to the Disney ride derivative. MPAA had the local police do its usual thing show up at the servers with handcuffs... what, did they forget the dogs? They confiscated the servers and successfully shut down The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site showing file locations, for a few days. Dan, Mitch, Cary, and Dean were all happy again, until..... they fought back.

There was protest in front of Parliament with hundreds of people waving pirate flags, hackers broke into the computers of the Swedish police and disabled their site and The Pirate Baywas put back online with the following message, which was a bit different from what the Grokster assholes put up, here it is:

"Only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site."

Also, sites all over the world mirrored The Pirate Bay, making the site, which already gets some fifteen million hits a day, stronger than ever.


Dean Garfield, MPAA's legal director, was instrumental in getting Swedish police jazzed about the big raid. It amazes me that corporate associations like RIAA and MPAA are able to mobilize police departments this way for, at best, civil infractions, but they have been doing it successfully all over the world, and getting away with it. Dean has been outed doing some very nasty things, like paying hackers to break into the emails of people working at TorrentSpy.

It's like McCarthyism, the law now is all about intent so finding emails and evidence of specific intent to contribute to infringement is what it's all about, so anyone working in this field at all is likely to be subject to intensive spying. This is supposed to deter anyone from even thinking about P2P, and it's been fairly effective. People all over the world have been taking this lying down, but not the Swedes. So, hopefully, citizens in other places will be alerted and emboldened by news of this. It won't make any mainstream newscasts, that's for sure, but, that's what citizen journalism via the internet is for.

P2P City

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When the labels started screaming about downloading in 2000, broadband was in some 3 million homes and DSL was in under a million. Now, these magic bullets, which make downloading feasible to the tune of upwards of 50 Mbps, have quintupled and are accessible by almost half of all American homes and 75% penetration is expected by 2010. Millions of people come into the wonderful world of high speed internet access every month and as they do, they build music libraries, largely from free sites. I discussed the rampant growth of P2P, despite continued propaganda to the contrary, in my 3/29/05 post and here's some more analysis.

This music as water theory, as discussed by Gerd Leonhard and Dave Kusek in their book The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Revolution is very similar to EFF's compulsory license (see my 12/27/04 post) and is doubtlessly where this will all shake out at some point. Once the technology exists for so many people to effortlessly and cheaply (if you consider broadband access cheap, many don't, but, I'm getting to that) access and find music they love, there's little that can be done to stop it. Though that doesn't mean strong efforts to stop it won't continue. The labels, with over 10k settled lawsuits already, are now suing hundreds of college students, right before finals, for using I2, an intranet.

Close behind the wave of music is film. The only thing that has really kept film from being in the same position as music is the technology. Downloading a film, for most of us, requires tying up your computer for an hour or so, and you don't even get the DVD features. Actually being able to burn the movie onto disk requires a better computer than one you'd need to do the same thing with music. But, all that is quickly changing. We now have 3G and 4G, the next generations of wireless, are already being tested in Maui, $40./mo. for 1Mbps connection. San Diego residents, for $79./mo. can now use their phones to watch videos, download music over the internet at 320kbps.

I find the Wi-Fi stuff most appealing because of its grass roots nature. Philadelphia and Portland are now trying to heat up their entire cities with hot spots built up from an ad hoc network of routers and antennas put up by various organizations and companies, even individuals, I would suppose. Many have warned of the FCC or other entities, trying to assert control over the internet. There's a bit of trend toward censorship, in case you hadn't noticed. Just ask Wiley & Sons who had the audacity to publish an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs and he pulled all of the publishers books from all his stores. Powell and Delay have been neutralized for now, but, let's face it, we're just a nipple away from oppression.

Anyway, the powers that be will have hard time prying into every little wireless outpost and neighborhood to see if members are sharing files on their city subsidized P2Ps. Sounds good to me. Though I do worry about Snocap and others who try to assert control over the free P2P providers (well, as free as radio or TV, you can get ads).

Verizon got a law passed after Philadelphia Freedom shined saying they'd have right of first refusal from now on. So, I'm also concerned about any of the telecoms getting too big. But, lots of progressive places are watching closely and this will probably be a huge hit. Of course in Palo Alto, it'll be mired in committee till the technology is outdated. We were the last city in the country to get cable TV, why? Everyone has a graduate degree but no one agrees.

Speaking of finally selling out to the big Comcastic, monopolistic, capitalist pigs, there are also many broadband outposts as well; high-speed cable modems and fiber optic networks. The main point is that the infrastructure is building up. To me, the exciting part of this discussion is what the applications will be. What is the virtual landscape of the future? Soon, we will each not only have a geographic, GPS address but an internet address, and not just an inbox for email. There will be a virtual landscape that mirrors and enhances our physical landscape. There will be property owners and intellectual property owners, and those that have valuable assets in each will profit. How that value is determined will change but, as always, popularity pays.

I can enjoy my neighbors at the market (we on the west coast congregate around produce not liquor) or coworkers at the office... or online. We already exchange lots of email, but, what if each time you reach out to touch someone online, you enter their site, which can contain their art, music, films, photos, documents, log... we were working on that screenplay together, well, I won't bother you with VoIP, or even email, I'll just add my changes in Wiki, the consumer screenwriting programs already allow online interface.

We will each have an online presence that is easy to access, pay for and manipulate. Soon, hopefully, a pay mechanism will follow suit. If you print one of my paintings, even at Jungle print which does gallery quality glicees, it will credit my account and debit yours a reasonable fee. If you listen to my song, a dime, download it, two dimes, I'll let you know where we gig. Watch my film, a buck, leave your comments. So, that's how I see things going. A physicist friend who's far ahead of the curve tells me we're talking generations, but, I'm sure I'll see many more changes in my lifetime... and look forward to them.

RIAA VS XM

This link is one of the best I've seen so far, not only because of the sardonic tone, which I always appreciate, especially when applied to the anathema of the earth RIAA, but its links and intervision. McKenzie picks up on why these vermin so undermine the fabric of our society, dragging us back to the dark ages of overvalued music. It's music! Not fucking gold bullion that spawns like fruit-flies for your endless profit.

I also liked this report, the first I saw, a few days ago, that show what liars these guys are.

And of course you can always count on the Extraordinary Freedom Fighters for a good assessment of the issues.

So, go XM! Save the world for democracy, freedom, music, Apple pie and all we hold dear! Let's hope they stay strong despite their set-backs, having dropped off 50% this year.

StreamCast Goes To Trial

So, this is good news. Grokster's codefendant in the Supreme Court case is now going to follow this through and provide the entertainment, legal and venture capital communities some security in this litigious world. I've felt all along they would win if one of these spineless P2P's would stand strong and I find Michael Weiss' hubris inspiring.

I mean, really, without the central servers and incriminating Sean Parker memos, Napster probably could have found the protection it needed under Sony. I wonder whether they will be able to get a jury trial for this. I don't know why Wilson would do it, unless he's very sympathetic. God, would I love to see RIAA in front of a jury. I'd love to do a documentary on this; the drama.

RIAA: But judge, how can we find a jury of people who haven't been sued by us? Without our wonderful DRM the world would be chaos, madness, goddamn it, we're talking Communism here!!

EFF: 75 Fucking years, does that mean anything to you? Happy Birthday is copyrighted for god's sake, I'm gonna have to pay Time Warner a million bucks if I sing it for you right now cause we're putting this all into a Michael Moore film.

From what I can tell, the labels were taking the approach they always do; go away and leave us your users and your brand and we won't flood you with discovery motions. Looks like Weiss may have been willing to do that except wanting, I don't know, maybe a job there for him and a few insiders? Then some new, meaner lawyers came in; lawyers who realized that there was a lot more money to be made if this went to trial.

Since RIAA is desperate, they were able to be persuaded to do an end run and go for a decision. But, what a gamble! If they lose, there will be no stopping the P2P's. The word will spread like wildfire and P2P traffic will increase exponentially, not just for music, for film too. It would eviscerate both industries. The labels are hoping this is exactly how the court will see it and will find some next step on liability.

If there's no smoking gun, some memo or email talking about what their users are doing, how will the court find liability? From the software itself? Well, Sony said you can't make that kind of jump. Then the Supreme Court said you can't find protection there if it looks like you are trying to contribute to infringement. But, what if you're not? Then you're back at square one, no liability. The Supreme Court never said you could use the system itself to infer liability, just that you couldn't find shelter there.

So, EFF and everybody and their brother are going to jump into this fray, bigtime. StreamCast is already $4M in the hole and will probably need help. Now I really do think we'll end up with a big bang when all these players start showing up to court. This is where the media usually jumps in, especially if there's a jury. So, stay tuned.

Justice Dept. to Probe RIAA!

I told you the tide was turning in DC. The Justice Dept. is launching an investigation similar to Eliot Spitzer's in NY to address the rampant price-fixing in this industry, this time they're specifically looking at online sales.

The labels are not gonna have that cush ride they expected when they were in there screaming about Napster. It's sort of like the US after 9-11. At first, people did feel sorry for us, but we squandered our goodwill and of course that rube Bush didn't care, or notice. Same with the labels, there was some sympathy at first, I mean, they did take it up the ass, and they got a sympathetic reaction from the courts and Congress. But, they don't know where to stop, they just got more and more aggressive and greedy, and they didn't even care how it looked.

But, you know, people are like that. They get imbued with a false sense of entitlement or power. I've started to notice how often it is the case that people don't realize what they've lost till it's long gone. I've seen marriages that are dead as a doornail go for years with no one willing to point it out, Skillings and Lays who rape and pillage California down to its last dime, people who don't realize how far they've gone, how much respect or sympathy they've lost until it's way too late. So, here's another example of desperate companies doing increasingly desperate things instead of doing what good businesses do and respond to the needs of their customers. And, the message is, there is a price.

The studios will survive for many more years distributing exquisite action films to a worldwide audience but, the labels are dinosaurs. The once $16B domestic industry is now under $12B and it will go nowhere but down. Music can be democratized so much more easily than film and it's gone too far to stop it. They've lost the youth. Their last hope is to hold on to catalog, but, they can't, the files are too small. They're out there, the genie is out of the bottle. It's like Tina Turner's patter before Proud Mary, she says, "Some people like it easy, and some people like it rough" . Well, these label guys are the toughest of the sharks and they like it rough. And, rough it's gonna be, for them and the folks who want their music.

In2Movies

Can't these guys at Warners, much less Microsoft, come up with one original idea? Warners new fake P2P movie download service stole my whole concept here. I just had to go grabbing up the blogspot domains, and now I do indeed have:

In2Movies

In2Music

N2Movies

You get the picture... I think I nabbed up a few similar names. But, I've been using this concept of being into stuff, or in2 stuff, or N2, or Nto.... for a long time.

When I googled IntoFilm, it actually came up with tons of stuff on the little sister website, to this one, IntoFilm. I found out that Intervision, IntoFilm and IntoTune are all traded on Blog Shares, some blog stock exchange thing that I didn't even sign up for... and I'm trading up! Now that I'm actually directing my readers there, I hope to see my stock price spike! My little blog has had over 20,000 hits in the little over a year of it's existence and all the linkage is starting to pay off as I write for more and more websites and work with more and more internet companies. More to come on that.

Make sure to check out my main blog:

Intervision

RIAA's Last Gasp

As we await the Pixar/Disney decision.... take a look at this story about how desperate the labels are getting. It is inevitable they will go after the ISPs... but that's a much different fight than the one they're waging against Patti Santangelo.

If they try that, I hope they have something better than contributory copyright infringement because the courts made it pretty clear in Grokster that you have to show intent and that intent based on the technology itself is not enough. They'll need to show the kind of stuff they had in Napster, internal memos showing intent to facilitate infringement of copyright. They'll never, ever win against the ISPs, and it will be so fun to watch them fry on the other side, as they see what it's like to be dwarfed.

If they think Congress will come to their aid, they're delusional. They can't even get Induce passed and there's a bill in committee right now that, if passed, will take it out of the courts, severely limiting the ability to prevail on contributory infringement. If anything, Congress is about to sway against them, even viv a vis the helpless American public.. God help them if they go up against the ISPs.

They'll end up, finally and mercifully, made into a utility, like water or cable TV, like we've been wanting for years now. Their commodity will ultimately be just so much bandwidth that they will provide under compulsory license, they'll probably have to track the the whole thing themselves. And then it will happen to the film industry.

And then they'll realize it really isn't worth it to make these big budget films, and then they'll start nominating all these story-driven dramas for Oscars and have people lined up around the block looking for small indies at Sundance and dozens of web-sites looking for content and filmmakers having lots of ways to make money off their films, with relatively low budgets and people will have lots more interesting films to watch and it will be easier to find them and... oh, that's now.

When you look at the choices and behavior of those in the know, you can see that they know exactly where the industry is headed.