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This spring was a tough time to be a pirate. On April 16, the French Navy captured a Somali pirate mother ship, striking a harsh blow against those scourges of the Adriatic Sea. The following day, a Swedish court found the four men behind the infamous Pirate Bay file sharing web site guilty of contributory copyright infringement, levying a heavy fine and a year in prison against all four.
For the Somalians, piracy is soon to be a thing of the past. The international community is sick of having their ships commandeered and their citizens' lives placed at risk, and so they are cracking down with the vast armada at their disposal. The Somalians don't stand a chance. The Swedes, well that's a different matter.
Even though the verdict was in their favor, the Motion Picture Association Of America hasn't won. They can't win because what they're fighting isn't Swedish web site operators, peer to peer users, CD burners, or album leak blogs. What they're fighting is change, and they're doing it poorly.
Aside from Metallica, the MPAA and the RIAA have been the biggest opponents to online file sharing since Shawn Fanning's Napster blew the doors off digital music back in 1999. They have lobbied Congress for stricter copyright laws, litigated against everyone under the sun, and done everything in their power to resist the change technology has wrought, all to little avail.
Fighting the spread of information on the Internet is like battling the mythical Hydra. For every web site you shut down, for every file sharer you sue, another dozen spring up in their place. The day Napster died, Limewire, Gnutella, and Kazaa went online to supply the still present demand. By the time the music industry got around to suing Kazaa, file sharing on peer to peer networks was outre and obsolete. BitTorrent had developed a craftier, more efficient means of sharing media and dozens of web sites were hard at work linking torrentors together. Pirate Bay was on it's way to becoming the most popular torrent site on the net.
While proponents of copyright enforcement continue to champion the legal victory, the verdict has yet to affect the founders, Pirate Bay or the site in any negative way. All four defendants are appealing the verdict and the web site has remained online since the servers were relocated, spread out over four nations, after the 2006 raid on Pirate Bay's headquarters. Sweden's Pirate Party, a political party dedicated to redesigning Swedish copyright and intellectual property laws, membership doubled in size, swelling from 15,000 members to over 35,000 in just a few days. At the core, it's an ideological battle, and the iGeneration currently coming of age has very little qualms about digital piracy.
The MPAA and the RIAA remains firmly entrenched in the old ways, having hardly made the slightest effort to change with the times. For good reason too, both organizations represent corporations whose entire business model is non-compatible with the changing media landscape. For a long time producing records, distributing films, and hyping it all up with advertising took a lot of money, and record labels and film studios were the only ones who could pony up the cash to make it possible. Now, any idiot with a laptop and a video camera can become a YouTube celebrity overnight, or score a 9.1 on Pitchfork and have the top selling album the following week. Neither artists nor fans need the industry anymore, and the industry knows it.
Aside from invoking commandment number eight (Thou Shall Not Steal for those who skipped Sunday school), the crux of the MPAA/RIAA's campaign has been that if the pirates win, creative artists won't be able to make money, and we'll be forced to live in a world without music or movies. Fortunately, that's not true at all. They may be right in one aspect: if the pirates win we might end up in a world without THEIR movies or music. But is that really a bad thing? Was "Waterworld" that much better than Robert Rodriguez's $7,000 student film, "El Mariachi"? Is the music Britney Spears makes of higher quality than the heartfelt guitar standards plucked out by the destitute bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta? The answer is pretty clear. Since the birth of modern media, the creative process has been stolen away from the everyman and locked away like a princess in an ivory tower. But now, as we leave behind the consumption of the Industrial Age in favor of the collaboration of the Information Age, it appears a pirate has come along and set her free.
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