The Sunday Times article titled “Yo ho ho , buccanerds give studios a broadside” is all about The Pirate Bay, its founders, the problems it’s faced and how it all started. If you’re wondering how it did, the two co-founders first met in 2001 at the HAL (Hackers at Large) conference in the Netherlands. The rest is a Wikipedia entry (as opposed to the long-outmoded history).
Svartholm talks about how The Pirate Bay, and other BitTorrent sites’ popularity is a clear indication of “civil disobedience against the current copyright legislation, on a huge scale.”
But the real highlight of the interview is his opinion on how publishers are afraid, due to lack of knowledge about BitTorrent and filesharing, of how their content is being stolen. He says, “Some publishers are afraid — out of ignorance — but even though they are wrong I can respect that. Some, however, like the MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”
Rabid, obsessed lunatics? I’m not sure too many people would disagree. In the past few years, the MPAA have single-handedly done some of the most outrageous things to prevent their movies from being “stolen”. They’ve sued a company for pre-loading legally purchased movie DVDs onto iPods, Stalked Svartholm, bred anti-piracy, DVD-sniffing dogs and banned Americans from inviting more than a certain number of people over to watch movies on a larger-than-29″ screen Home Theatre system. Oh wait, that last one didn’t happen. What’s really sad is that if they did actually do something like that, it wouldn’t surprise anyone!
Creative Commons photograph by David Wise.
