[pp.int.general] The Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party

[Brian McNeil]

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 08:17 +0000, Ed Galligan wrote:
> @Glenn Kerbein, @Brian McNeil
> Brian has stated that the GPS/knife analogy is "wrong in quite a
> number of ways" - and then continues by describing how bittorrent
> works and giving some (seemingly irrelevant) history of TPB's PR
> habits, neither of which demonstrated to me how the analogy is "wrong"
> in any way whatever.

I'll leave someone else to join the dots on that. It is not the indexing
and search website run by TPB which is problematic, it is the tracker
enabling people to commit copyright infringement.

> Despite that, I do think I'd have to side with rms and charly on this,
> not because I take issue with TPB, but simply because of the
> perception of us as "The Pirate Bay Party" - the 80-20% argument here
> seems to assume that everyone who fileshares will automatically be
> willing to support any filesharing-related political movement (or will
> even have the remotest interest in the politics behind it) - this is
> not the case.

> Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:

>         I see one possible approach. A PP hosted/controlled landing
>         page that is
>         aimed specifically at people using certain types of file
>         sharing to
>         commit copyright infringement.
>         
>         You can clearly, and up-front, disavow any approval of
>         copyright
>         infringement ("Don't join the Pirate Party if you just want
>         free TV and
>         movies"), then present the aspects of PP philosophy that they
>         might care
>         about. Most coming from somewhere like TPB will just leave,
>         but you'd
>         net some.

TBP is but one example of where I think this approach has merit. What
about YouTube, where they do try to yank content at a copyright-holder's
request? It makes me seethe to think that music videos made in the very
early days of MTV are still in copyright; they were made purely as a
promotional vehicle for the music, and are a part of our cultural
heritage. YouTube could be directing people who upload copies from their
dusty old VHS tapes, and then see them taken down, to PP. Many will be
unaware what they have done is not legal, nor where to go when they fall
foul of the system. I'm sure that somewhere in using Google's services
I've entered a search or something like that and been told to refer to
ChillingEffects.


-- 
Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
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