The Pirate Bay 4 Convicted: who does that make safer?

The conviction last Friday, 18 April 2009, of four young men who are part of the team that runs The Pirate Bay is an important signal. But of what?

For the MPAA and RIAA, along with the publishers and producers and other copyright owners they represent, the signal is that the battle against those who would steal and redistribute copyrighted material is progressively being won by the existing industry. Is this either true or good?

For people in the geek community who either use torrents to find and share media or whom maintain, either materially or ideologically, the means of sharing, the peer to peer networks, the signal is that the media industry still doesn’t understand that their business model has become indefensible. It also suggests that even progressive jurisdictions like Sweden have joined the defense of existing industry.

What is The Pirate Bay? The short answer is that it is the world’s largest bittorrent tracking site. It allows users to search for the files that contain metadata which makes it possible for client applications like Bittorrent, Vuze, Transmission, μTorrent to download media files: music, games, and video.

The Pirate Bay, along with an ecosystem of bittorrent tracker and search sites and their users, represent the worlds largest marketplace for digital media content. And to the consternation of media publishing and distribution business owners, this content and the means to access it are provided and available for free. This is a crucial point: the economy of sharing is non-monetary, it is what some call a gift economy.

Software developers for the torrent-net, those who make the client applications, offer their programs for free (though some, like Vuze have paradoxically adopted another old biz model and pump ads into the application framework). The tracker sites also contain ads, but their are no fees to users and users do not pay the site or each other for content. Those who create the torrents themselves, files which refer to the ultimate media file a user wants to download, are the “citizens” of this emerging media ecology. They copy files, music, TV (with ads removed), games and movies and post the torrents to a tracker site. This takes time, some skill, knowledge and effort and people do it for nothing: which is to say, they do not do it for money. This is vexing behavior and not only flies in the face of rational models of human interest and behavior, but clearly confounds the industry who increasingly treats this potential group of customers as criminals.

The sad fact which the existing media industry seems to acknowledge yet ignore is that people are willing to pay for media. We are no longer willing to simply let industry set prices, however, nor to determine how, where and why we use the content that we pay for. In other words, we are revolting against the media industry’s control over the market for media.

Who gets hurt by this? Ridiculous industry sponsored ad campaigns try to persuade us that we are taking the food off the stuntman’s table, that the key grip won’t be able to pay her rent and that writer’s won’t be able to afford bus fare to get to the movie set. These scenarios are pure nonsense and they leave unanalyzed the economics of an industry that spends $200 million producing Michael Bay action picture that lose money. Who are the real criminals here? Am I alone in thinking that an industry that pays Tom Cruise upwards of $20 million a picture has created its own problems?

The harms that are produced by sharing media files are surely nothing as against the economic damaage that has been done by the auto industry and the finacial services (…IS global economic collapse a service?). These are industries that we allow our governments to bail out to the tune of billions of dollars. But we are supposed to feel safer now that four young Swedish men have been convicted to a year in prison and required to pay damages of almost $4 million?

Who does that make safer?