Before I started this humble WordPress.com blog I ran another self-hosted one at www.andrewcurrie.ca — that domain is currently one of those “lifestream” thingies, but you can still see my previous blog there if you know where to look (not anymore, sorry). It runs on a proprietary blog engine called ExpressionEngine. This is important.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
People of the internet…
I represent a small social network on Ning.com – I have chosen to protect my identity because of what I’m about to say…
Today we are declaring war on Facebook!
When Facebook started, it was pretty cool. Then, they changed the design. And everyone was all: “Waah waah, why’d you do that? We don’t like it.” And then they changed the design again, and everyone was all like: “Waah waah, you did it again. I don’t understand. I’m stupid.”
So a friend and I started a social network called The Wahmbulance – as in: “Why don’t you call the Wahmbulance?” Anyway, it’s awesome.
Up to now we’ve been recruiting our friends on Facebook and bringing them here. But today, we take the fight to them!
People of Facebook: Our content will be in your newsfeeds, our pictures in our profiles. You will be surrounded by our awesome-ness on all sides.
Members of The Wahmbulance: We may be only fifty people strong, compared to their two hundred million, so pimp out your pages with sparkles and shit, post your blogs to Facebook. And do not waver, because this is war!
It may not be the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the beginning of the beginning…
So I woke up this morning to news that a verdict had been officially passed down on The Pirate Bay Four — actually it was leaked first and then officially passed down, in a fitting bit of irony.
TorrentFreak (an apparent fan of BitTorrents) has posted the details:
All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000 USD.
The accused are widely expected to appeal the decision, and the process could take years to complete. But assuming for a moment that the verdict sticks, here’s what I think are the consequences:
Will it stop piracy? Absolutely not — quite the opposite, in fact. The people who make this stuff available will just burrow deeper into the Internet and make themselves harder to track. Ever more innovative ways to share files will be invented, attacked and eventually shut down. Lather, rinse and repeat.
Will it stagnate the growth of the Internet? It certainly has the potential to. If this guilty verdict holds then big media’s next logical target would be Internet Service Providers. And with file sharing said to account for at least 20% of all Internet traffic those throttled speeds and data caps we all complain about likely won’t be going away anytime soon.
Has Hollywood made enemies of its customers? Well, they’ve certainly made one. If my only legal options for watching a Hollywood movie are (1) to visit my local multiplex and pay for the privilege of being forced to watch up to 20 minutes of ads and trailers before the film even starts, or (2) to buy or rent a locked-down DVD and be forced to sit through the same incessant ads that I can’t skip past, then I guess I’ll take neither. Maybe instead of passively consuming media I’ll create some — maybe a blog post, perhaps about the fact that Hollywood itself was born of pirates.
Yeah, you heard me.
Check this quote from Lawrence Lessig from the archives of WIRED Magazine:
The Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early 20th century in part to escape controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a monopoly ‘trust’ based on Edison’s creative property and formed to vigorously protect his patent rights.
The same is true for the industries of music, radio and television. So if you think it’s a little hypocritical for big media to sweep its own disruptive technologies and distribution models under the carpet while attacking The Pirate Bay for doing the same then congratulations, you are officially capable of critical thought — which apparently has no place in this day and age of big media bullying. 
