Welcome to the year 2009.
In the year 2009, we enjoy many modern conveniences. Invisible radiation cooks our food at five times the normal speed. Our television, once static-covered and hard to read, is clear and of very high definition. "Iced Cream" can be purchased from mobile vendors, often the same truck which brings you your weekly stash of illegal drugs. It is truly a space-aged future we live in. But some advances come at the cost of hundreds of human lives and livelihoods. Among the most terrible of these advances? MUSIC PIRACY!!
(...Dun dun duuuun.)
Somewhere in Sweden, as I type this, several funny-talking, blond 20-somethings are (hopefully) drinking and celebrating. They have, over the course of 9 days, soundly and authoritatively whipped a conglomeration of local prosecution lawyers and employees of an industry so foul that the people who call themselves Pirates are the clear favorite.
That's a dangling part of speech up there -- won't bore you with which one -- but I do want to clarify I in no way blame the Swedish government. Throughout the first decade of the 2000's our country's legal system was gorged with record-industry psychos attempting to extract cash from confused grandmothers. Every country has their breaking point. Sweden's is the descent of the entire world's recording industry. Ours happened to be the ill-informed and probably bribe-driven statements of the members of Metallica. We all have our standards.
Day after day, the really-not-very-old men of The Pirate Bay do the work of modern Robin Hoods. The Bay, if you've been, really is a very simple community (at least on the surface) of filesharers. These people, too cheap to buy the $5 DVD from the bin at Wal-Mart, will spend the time and effort to help anyone they come across achieve their goal, and that's become more valuable on the internet than money. Thus, despite a legal minefield and an almost entirely infiltration-prone technology, people flock to The Pirate Bay for the latest and greatest flying through the Tubes.
As the IFPI, the RIAA and Sweden itself battle, we look to the outcome to present the future of the internet: Will this small, admittedly unfamiliar country set the standard for a free and open 'net? Or are we going back to the AOL days of pay-by-the-hour preselected "Info" crap?
More on this with further trial news in Part 2.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment