But of course, being involved with the running of The Pirate Bay means there is little time for anything else and this is the main reason cited by Peter behind his decision to quit – he wants time to do other things.

“I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read,” he said.

Touching briefly on the challenges facing the site’s operators, Peter – who is known to millions of Internet users as brokep – said that they had “been raised to another level” adding that it’s “time for biological dispersal.”

Promising not to give up his battle in pressing for a better Internet, Peter says his resignation marks the end of an era, “..but I am simply leaving a role in order to be a person instead,” he said.

BitTorrent will miss you – Good luck Peter!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Now that things have settled down a little, we took the opportunity to ask one of the defendants some questions of our own. We spoke with Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde about the trial and the future of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

TF: Before the trial started, you said that it was going to be a theater – Hollywood style. Looking back at recent weeks, did your predictions come true?

Peter: Yeah, some days it was a really weird show outside! A lot of stuff happened in secret too, and those events will probably come out in the documentary. It’s been great theater!

TF: Are you satisfied with how the trial played out? Do you still predict an EPIC WIN?

Peter: Right now, yes. I’m very happy about it and I still predict an EPIC WIN for sure. But you never know. We expect a win but we’re prepared for the worst case scenario, so that we don’t get too beaten up if that happens.

TF: During the trial, the prosecution was heavily criticized for their lack of knowledge about BitTorrent, and how people use it to transfer files. Would you agree with this?

Peter: Yeah. We actually presented our own video ‘how-to’ to the court during the final day, to make sure the jurors got the right knowledge on how it works. The prosecution has tried to show BitTorrent as something bad and suspicious and we wanted to show that it’s legitimate and has a broader use than just STEALING FILES FROM THE POOR COPYRIGHT LOBBY…

TF: A lot of people are worried about the future of The Pirate Bay. However, the trial seems to be against four individuals, not against the site/tracker. Worst case scenario: Is there a possibility that people will have to do without TPB in the future?

Peter: If TPB is not used in the future, it is because there’s a new technology available that makes TPB obsolete.

TF: Do you think there’s a future for BitTorrent as it is now, or do you expect that file-sharing will change in the future?

Peter: I think it will evolve of course, but BitTorrent is on the right path to stay relevant for a while. The problem with a decentralized tracking system is that there’s no way (right now) to keep spammers and IP-stealers away from the network, which one can do on TPB for instance. Media Defender was a good example of that, TPB could find their IPs and lock them away rapidly without having to tell the users to update files.

Good solutions like that might appear in the future for end users, but it’s still a long way off. BitTorrent as a technology will be used for the actual sharing, or at least the basic concept of BitTorrent.

TF: There has been a lot of trial coverage online, both by traditional press and bloggers. What are some of the positive and negative surprises?

Peter:There were no real surprises. The media coverage of TPB has been somewhat the same over the past years. There are no secrets surrounding TPB that could come out and harm us, which keeps it easy to maintain a good relationship with the media. I’m just happy that people take part in the discussion about the Internet’s future, which has been promoted to debate by this spectrial.

TF: We’ve heard rumors that Anakata traveled to Cambodia after the trial. Is he meeting King Kong there or is there another explanation?

Peter: I’m not sure if he’s in Cambodia – he travels a bit for a customer that he’s working with. But, I think he’s in Asia at least. And yeah, he’s probably drinking cider with King Kong one of these days.

TF: Finally, do you have any good advice for the judge while he’s reviewing the case?

Peter: Don’t trust the prosecution – they don’t know what they’re doing.

—

The verdict is due on April 17. Links to our previous Pirate Bay trial coverage can be found below.

Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Summary.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Today, piracy has become more and more like, someone who likes freedom, someone who likes information exchange” says Peter. “It’s only positive, it’s only, only good and you know, that is piracy according to some people, and you get labeled as a pirate.”

Peter then goes on to state some of the objectives and motivation behind running the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker: “We’re fighting, The Pirate Bay is fighting for freedom because we don’t want to be information slaves, we don’t want to have someone else decide what we should and shouldn’t think.”

Despite massive effort by the music and movie industries to create a negative image of piracy, for some, the term ‘pirate’ has lots of positive connotations these days and Peter is happy to be labeled as one: “We call ourselves pirates because the recording industry is calling us pirates and we think it’s a cool thing to be a pirate. It’s people today that want to share information and the internet has changed how people actually distribute music and movies so the industry is very scared of the change.”

Most modern-day media pirates would agree, piracy hasn’t always been easy. Tools haven’t always been readily available nor priced in a way that makes piracy accessible to all. The internet – providing worldwide communication and information interchange for everyone who accesses it – has changed all of that. Putting that genie back in the bottle may prove impossible, says Peter:

“Previously we wanted to have information free but it was hard and the Internet has made it easy. This is an evolution that’s needed and I think in a hundred years we’re gonna look back at this period and say: “We were so stupid to even try and stop it”

But the movie and music industries are attempting to stop it and they do not consider themselves stupid for trying. Indeed, the movie industry in particular is putting huge resources into trying to curtail piracy and has put significant amounts of effort into shuttering The Pirate Bay.

“Getting all of the industry against you makes it very hard,” says Peter, “it is so important that the people can communicate and they want to stop this for, you know, economical reasons – and they’re not even right about the economical aspects.”

The BBC interviewer questions Peter on this point: “You say they are wrong about the economical aspects but they would say: ‘I own this film, I own this music, and you are stealing this from me’. How are they wrong about the economical aspect?”

“Well, what we’ve seen in the music industry is that interest is growing, more people are interested in music and they spend more money than ever on music, but the record industry is shrinking because nobody wants to buy CDs anymore, it’s an inferior product, you can’t put the CD directly on your MP3 player.”

Indeed, the music industry has been incredibly slow to adapt to the digital revolution, in the main preferring to insist that people continue to buy their music on plastic discs, instead of the incredibly popular, flexible (and easily copied) MP3 format. Peter believes it’s about control:

“They don’t want to sell MP3s because they feel they don’t have the control they used to have, so they don’t understand that they are losing out on money because they are not following how the industry is changing.”

But it’s the ‘reproduction pirates’ – file-sharers – that are taking over the ship now. They’re everywhere says the BBC, and they’re multiplying. Tarleton Gillespie, assistant professor at the Department of Communication, Cornell University explains:

“The generation that scares the music industry more is the next one, the one that’s coming up now because they’ve never known anything different. There’s always been peer to peer [for them], there’s always been very easy ways to get on whichever service you want and the music is there. So the question of how to get it…it’s not backroom dealing or someone setting up a table on the street corner, it is always there, so the music industry is struggling because they have to figure out how to convince that generation to think of anything other than “this is the easiest and most free way to get my music.”

The full 3-part article accompanying the podcast can be found here.

The podcast itself can be downloaded here, and is packed with lots of information, provided free of charge, without DRM, and in convenient MP3 format. How media should be.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.