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The Pirate Bay to BBC: We Don’t Want To Be Information Slaves

enigmax — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:08:59 +0000

The podcast starts off with the BBC reporter buying physical bootleg DVDs on the streets of London, but later develops into a discussion with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde.

“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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentPod Episode 28

Ernesto — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:50:05 +0000

Enjoy, and feel free to leave a (audio) comment if you have something to say to Charlie, or if you want to comment on the show in general. There’s more good stuff from Charlie over at pod2peer.com.

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed , and the BitTorrent RSS feed for the show. You can download the .torrent over here, and the mp3 here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

TorrentPod Episode 27

Ernesto — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:56:07 +0000

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TorrentPod Episode 26

Ernesto — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:23:43 +0000

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TorrentPod Episode 25

Ernesto — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:18:41 +0000

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TorrentPod Episode 24

Ernesto — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 12:43:16 +0000

The song in the intro of this episode is F-in-A, I Love Jesus! from WWIII.

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TorrentPod Episode 22

Ernesto — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:57:32 +0000

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TorrentPod Episode 21

Ernesto — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:05:57 +0000

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

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TorrentPod Episode 20

Ernesto — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:30:40 +0000

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

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TorrentPod Episode 19

Ernesto — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 14:15:16 +0000

For people who can’t read, or people who like podcasts.. ;)

You can listen to the show using the on-site player, download the mp3 directly, or grab the .torrent. Here’s the RSS feed , and the BitTorrent RSS feed for the show.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.