Just to recap the last week or so for The Pirate Bay, the largest bittorrent engine in the world,
They were raided by the police, evidently under pressure from the United States and the MPAA. Keep in mind, of course, that this is in Sweden. You know, one of the places that isn’t the US. Their servers (along with other sites servers, which just happened to be in the same room) are seized.
Three days later:
Pirate Bay is back up, and now operating (evidently) as a distributed site in multiple countries with redundency. Ah, the beauty of Gilmore’s Law in action.
Their own take on it:
Just some stats…
… here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes – and how long it usually takes to fix:Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days
.. yawn.
And finally, an absolutely brilliant speech from some of the people responsible for Pirate Bay, given at the Reboot conference.
The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways.
How cool are these dudes? They have their own political party. Seriously. How much is a one way ticket to Sweden these days?
