Steal This Film - Pirate Bay #spectrial Edition (updating)

If anyone reading this uses a computing device of any sort, a viewing of Steal This Film Trial Edition is heartily recommended, even if you haven't heard of the current spectacle trial [Twitter: #spectrial] brought by the media industry against some Swedish kids who enjoy technical challenges and travel the Internet under the moniker of The Pirate Bay. More later on the spectrial in which half the charges were dropped within the first two days.

Keep an eye out for appearances by Sebastian Lütgert and his endorsement of peer-to-peer as the new economy of community. He positively buzzes on the vibe of what he describes as:

"a force like this, a power like this, zillions of people, connected. Sharing data, sharing their work, sharing the work of others. The situation is unprecedented in human history and it is a force that will not be stopped."
....
"The files have been shared. There's no way back. It's not about shutting down BitTorrent. It would be about confiscating everyone's hard drives. The files are out there. They have been downloaded. They're down. There's no up anymore. They're all down."

All the creativity of each and every connected individual shared in one big collective of information, ideas, sights and sounds.The only people upset about it are those moneyed enough not to have to worry about it. Therefore, the root of the issue isn't the one stated by the media mafia and their 'legal' representation -- which includes Monique Wadstedt who also acts on behalf of the Church of Scientology -- of money and profits but the control of information and sensory experience, sensory experiences that the dominator capitalist culture has always sought to imprison within various commoditised Pandora's boxes. But Pandora's Box was opened a long time ago. Steal This Film!

STEAL THIS FILM
DOWNLOAD THE TRIAL EDITION

IN 2006, A GROUP OF FRIENDS DECIDED TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT FILESHARING... AND THROUGH THE PIRATE BAY, WE WERE COPIED AND MULTIPLIED BEYOND OUR IMAGINATIONS. TODAY THE PIRATE BAY ARE ON TRIAL, AND WE ARE PROUD TO SUPPORT THEM WITH THIS TRIAL EDITION OF STEAL THIS FILM. STF 'TRIAL EDITION' CONTAINS UNSEEN FOOTAGE, INCLUDING BROKEP AND TIAMO PREPARING FOR THE TRIAL, AND RE-ENACTMENTS OF THEIR POLICE INTERVIEWS. IT REPRESENTS 'STEAL THIS FILM 2.5', HALF WAY BETWEEN PART 2 AND THE 'FINAL CUT' WE ARE SHOOTING RIGHT NOW IN STOCKHOLM @ THE TRIAL. AFTER THIS RELEASE, WE WILL BE OFFERING IRREGULAR REPORTS ON THE TRIAL, WHICH WE'LL DISTRIBUTE IN CONJUNCTION WITH OUR FRIENDS @ TORRENTFREAK. AS ALWAYS SHARE, REDISTRIBUTE AND REJOICE, DONATE IF YOU LIKE. WE ARE ALL ON TRIAL TODAY - BUT THE TIRED OLD MASTERS WILL NEVER WIN.LEAGUE OF NOBLE PEERS, FEBRUARY 2009. - À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ!

There are a good few writings on Reason.... in relation to the human inclination to participate in the sharing of resources via the Internet and peer to peer technologies. Many of the ideas expressed in these articles feature in Steal This Film because, no matter what the issue and despite what the post-modernists and liars might have everyone believe, truth is objective. A good place to start is the P2P label. Personal favourites include:

• Filesharing - The New Economy of Community
• Global Free Trade Under Threat From Corporate Greed
• P2P Vs the 0.01 Percent-ers
• The music industry is shit-scared of the Internet

Oh, and if you happen to believe there is any justification for the years of legal actions instigated by various cabals of media conglomerates against various individuals and groups outside of their profiteering cabal, perhaps you should learn a little more of how and why the Internet was designed.

Computer Networks - The Heralds of Resource Sharing

A documentary film about the history of the ARPANET and birth of the Internet.

Thus is exposed the inherent injustice, wrongness and intrinsic flaws in the actions of global media conglomerates as they endeavour to persecute and profit from people who are only using the Internet for the purpose it was intended, sharing.

---===[ STEAL THIS ARTICLE! ]===---
Link it, copy it, email it,
PDF it, print it, Digg it,
Mixx it, Reddit, Stumble it,
Tweet it.
---===[ STEAL THIS ARTICLE! ]===---

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Extras:

- This filesharer.org business is probably worth steering clear of:

This is what a criminal looks like | filesharer.org
Let the music and movie industry know who the file-sharers are. Upload a picture of yourself and show them what a criminal looks like!

Oh yes, good idea. Probably best to also send them your home and work addresses along with the bank details of any accounts held in your name. [Edit: For balance see Thomas' comment]

- Day 5 of #spectrial and questions are raised by the defence about whether the prosecution was a political action rather than a criminal one. Given the approximate association of the Pirate Bay with the Pirate Party and their copyright and patent objectives, and the fact that half the criminal charges against the Pirate Bay were dropped in the first two days of the trial, it's difficult to see the debacle as anything other than a political prosecution.

The Pirate Bay is loosely affiliated with the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party's sole aims appear to be the reform of copyright law, the abolition of patents, and guaranteeing the right to privacy, none of which are bad things for greater mass of the humanity:

The Pirate Party

Introduction to Politics and Principles

The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.

Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very dangerous direction.

The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:

Reform of copyright law

The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.

The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.

We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

An abolished patent system

Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents.

The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level.

Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries).

Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.

Respect for the right to privacy

Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has allowed itself to be swept along in a panic reaction to try to end all evil by increasing the level of surveillance and control over the entire population. We Europeans should know better. It is not twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of other horrific examples of surveillance-gone-wrong in Europe's modern history.

The arguments for each step on the road to the surveillance state may sound ever so convincing. But we Europeans know from experience where that road leads, and it is not somewhere we want to go.

We must pull the emergency brake on the runaway train towards a society we do not want. Terrorists may attack the open society, but only governments can abolish it. The Pirate Party wants to prevent that from happening.

The Pirate Party ideology appears to be spreading. The cocky forthrightness of the Pirate Bay and their defence team, along with the links into the Pirate Party lend further credibility to the idea that this is indeed a political prosecution by the Media Corporations Inc. of those espousing and bringing to life an opposing ideology that threatens the concept of private ownership of everything, from physical objects to ideas.

Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, summed it up when he said:

"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century."

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Update 25/02/09
Free is as Free Does

One of the many invalid arguments of the transnational global media conglomerates to deflect, detract and distract from the main motivating factor for their actions, the profit motive, is that artists won't do anything for free. This argument, they believe, is sufficient justification for extending their historical racketeering ways without let or hindrance across international boundaries and borders.

According to the media industry: Artists won't create art, musicians won't make music, film makers won't make films, and writers won't write.

What those who seek global full spectrum dominance over humanity's shared culture have failed to notice as the Internet and the world has grown up around them, leaving the former culture controlling giants as cowering, anti-human midgets in the process, is that the whole of Internet-connected humanity is perfectly prepared to do pretty much everything for free. Such is the nature of the new economy of community where we consciously recognise our shared humanity in open defiance of those who would seek to keep us all in separate, convenient, individualist, nuclear-familied consumer units.

The truth of the matter is that artists WILL create art, musicians WILL make music, and writers WILL write. They have been doing it throughout history and the history of the Internet. In turn, the Internet has developed to facilitate ever more novel ways and means to make it so.

This article was conceived of, written, and published for free. Below is some art created for free by Eisner Award-winner Dylan Horrocks' that is specifically NOT copyrighted, originally drawn up in support of New Zealand's #blackout, which appeared on The Pirate Bay. Elsewhere, the Internet is awash with articles that people have written and published for free, music that people have made and published for free, and films like Steal This Film which have been created and published for free.

Today it is announced that the typist for the whole of the world's culture, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, "is aiming to have the framework of an international strategy to combat illegal internet downloads agreed with the US and European partners by the autumn." Yesterday, Irish ISP Eircom wasn't going to comply with requests to block access to sites like the Pirate Bay. Today, apparently, that decision is reversed.

It is reputed that the godfather of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, claimed that fascism could be thought of as the seamless merging of state and corporate power. The actions of the international media conglomerates, in tandem with various governments, are quite simply the modern manifestation of Mussolini's political ambitions.

The fight back against those that seek to suppress the innate human creativity and the innate human need to share their creativity is now the imperative duty of everyone.

The legendary Terence McKenna on how corporate/State controlled Culture is not Your Friend:

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Ho ho ho! IFPI and their legal team appear to be clutching at straws somewhat: Pirate Bay Day 8 - Prosecutors change charges | Technology | guardian.co.uk

I hate to say I told you so, but.....

From this very blog some three and a half years ago:

25 June 2005
Filesharing - The New Economy of Community

All this time later and those lovely people historically responsible for holding vibrations of air hostage are still trying to figure a way to keep their profitable racketeering going by 'monetising" Peer-to-Peer (P2P) filesharing while simultaneously co-opting The Antagonist's very own "new economy" tag:

30th October 2008 18:21 GMT
The Register
A new economics of P2P file sharing

The difference between the two? In the new economy of community sharing, a trait taught to toddlers, isn't a crime.

Better yet, El Reg does the Antagonista-told-you-so-doble, complete with a beautifully ironic twist.

The following quote about your humble blogger -- note the name of the person who penned it -- is taken from the Feelers' right-hand sidebar entry over that-a-way ->:

"I’m glad to be able to announce that the UK now has it’s very own mindless twit. || Either that or he’s a damn good satirist."

- Tim Worstall

Three posts of a kind, all about the popularly propagated myth that cannabis consumption is responsible for increased levels of psychosis, all published right here on Reason.... just weeks before the 2005 coup d'etat "power surge" changed everything:

22 June 2005 The Cannabis Psychosis Myth Exploded 24 June 2005 Cannabis Psychosis Myth Explosion #2 26 June 2005 Cannabis, Mushrooms, Psychoactives & Evolution

Three and half years on from the three of a kind and El Reg publishes this little gem by, er, the same author as the Feelers quote:

6th November 2008 13:19 GMT
The Register
Study clears cannabis of schizophrenia rap
No greater risk than general non-tokers
By Tim Worstall

Well, well. Who'd have thunk it? More amusing yet is the fact that Worstall uses a few points about the myth of cannabis psychosis, made by yours truly in the articles posted over three years ago, and then claims that nobody has ever posited such notions before.

Apparently, the truth of any matter is of no consequence until it is coopted, prounounced by, and charged for by scientists.

Ho ho ho! "Mindless twit" it is then, as confirmed by scientists after  three years of intensive research.

NIN's Trent Reznor finds no more Happiness In Slavery

Long time readers of Anything that defies my sense of reason.... will be aware of one or two instances where the The Antagonist has taken more than a little pleasure watching the music, video and media oligopolies condemn themselves slowly and painfully to the annals of history through their reluctance and outright refusal to adapt to the way the world happens to be. Only a correct analysis of and adaptation to the material conditions of existence will result in the survival of any organism and time after time media organisations have failed to evolve, even though some of the temporary solutions are obvious.

Nine Inch Nails frontman and driving force Trent Reznor today struck out at the march of the pigs, the march of the corporate capitalist media pigs, who continue to exploit music makers and music lovers still gullible enough to regard a dollar's worth of plastic to be worth paying twenty to thirty times that.

Here's Trent Reznor on the subject:

Posted on [05_13_2007]

As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. A couple of examples that quickly come to mind:

* The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne's record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).

By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: "It's because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy."

So... I guess as a reward for being a "true fan" you get ripped off.

Not good for the fans, not good for the artists, and yet another nail in the coffin of the media oligopolies that can now count both music fans and music makers on their list of enemies.

July 4th : Independence Through Decentralisation

Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead

Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people ... In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent "tracker" servers.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization's actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing "legal torrent" services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology's non-infringing potential.

Source: Wired News, 14 December, 2004.

Then came this, and this, and this, and this, and all of these which sort of indicated that the above statement was a little misleading.

Then came this development a few weeks ago. From the BitTorrent Trackerless information page:

As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot!

Now it's new, improved BitTorrent Trackerless - with added Trackerless Support - which turns the 100 IP addresses targeted in December's round of the global media's "Which impoverished individual can we sue to keep ourselves rich" into a multiplicity of anywhere up to 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. And this isn't even up and running properly yet with its 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moving-target-trackers.

The Antagonist hates to say, "I told you so", but in light of this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, what next?

Morpheus/Grokster Senate Ruling Explained

According to the BBC, file-sharing has suffered a major defeat as a result of a US Supreme Court ruling that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.

This, of course, is utter nonsense and The Antagonist will explain forthwith but first needs to get this little lot out of the system and into the ether... following the logic of this judgement, how about suing Microsoft for making the operating system on which the file-sharing software runs? Or maybe Cisco and other communications companies for helping build the networks across which all this data travels? What about Charles Babbage? Nobody's sued him yet, the bastard, and he started all this back in the 18th century. He might be dead but that hasn't stopped them before. Then we could sue the gun and weapons manufacturers for what individuals and governments who purchase their products then go on to do with them.

Obviously, holding governments to account for anything - even killing thousands of people on the basis of no evidence at all - will never happen and so is completely non-sensical, just like the notions of suing Microsoft, Cisco and dear old Mr Babbage. By virtue of something known as the logical extension, the senate ruling also renders itself immediately null and void and disappears in a puff of logic.

Anyway, back to the point... The headline is entirely misleading and filesharing has not suffered any form of setback at all. What has suffered, however, are perfectly legal file-sharing services that aren't approved by the international media conglomerates, i.e. other businesses who had the foresight to get in on making money from P2P first.

The story relates to the legal case of big business versus Streamcast Networks - the makers of the Grokster and Morpheus filesharing software. Streamcast happened to achieve what the media industry had consistently failed to achieve and managed to generate revenue streams from file-sharing networks. That Streamcast beat the international media companies to the job of so doing is the bugbear of big business and the reasoning behind the legal action.

Initially media companies started victimising a handful of individuals who were, are, and will never be anything more than an insignificant statistic in an ever-growing network of half-a-billion peers. When that tactic failed miserably in the only way it ever could and numbers of peer-to-peer users continued to increase dramatically, the media companies set their sites on other targets. One of these targets is any company that had the foresight of trying to generate media revenue streams from the Internet, a medium and problem that Sony executives themselves admitted they were 'shit scared' of back in 1998 and still failed to address.

So what we have is a worldwide media industry that is watching its artificially maintained empire collapse and crumble as it lashes out at anyone and everyone in a desperate attempt to save something that doesn't exist in the form that it once did.

The Antagonist hates to be the one to open anyone's eyes to anything but the fundamental essence of business in the free markets that man created so many rules to keep 'free', is one of cut-throat competition. Business across all industries has consistently shown that where profits are concerned anything goes and staying one step ahead of the competition is all that matters.

So when the same multi-national industries who preach the virtues of free-markets have to resort to suing competitors who have been more competitive than themselves, the practice can only be seen for what it is, entirely anti-competitive and against the nature of anything that vaguely resembles a free-market at all. You can't have it both ways. That the Senate appears to support this anti-competitive and restrictive practice should tell us all we need to know about them too.

And, on that note, The Antagonist would like to recommend that the media industries dedicate at least a small portion of their seemingly limitless legal funds to the purchase of a copy of Dale Carnegie's excellent book, 'How To Win Friends and Influence People'. If, however, the coffers are running a little low owing to the free-market economy that keeps the coffers of everyone else in the world a little low, they could always try the peer-to-peer networks they spend so long scouring and scratching their increasingly more furrowed brows at.

Filesharing - The New Economy of Community

The BPI has growled and snarled again and is victimising and showing its teeth to another small handful of people in the UK who form a tiny fraction of users in an Internet population of over 400,000,000 file sharers around the world.

The Antagonist has written several times about the fundamental truths that underlie the p2p debate, and the futility of the issuance of legal threats (here, here, here and here) and is once again duty bound to authoring the following article in another attempt to introduce whatever tiny degree of logic possible into the arena of file-sharing discussion.

Conceptually, the issue is not that file-sharing occurs, rather the inevitable consequences of that file-sharing.

Confused? You won't be...

The Inevitable Transformation of Copy Rights

Since its inception, the Internet has resulted in the emergence of the ultimate fantasy of free-market-fetishists everywhere, an entirely cooperative and entirely free-market that dissolves international boundaries, regulates itself without rules, and in which anyone with an Internet connection can participate.

This Internet community has built itself almost from nothing to the crescendo of now in the space of just 20 years and it is only just starting to be recognised, or perhaps openly acknowledged by those that have denied it for so long, as the force of evolution and escalating consciousness that is its very essence.

This community, for it is a community in the true sense of the word, has created all manner of things from open-source operating systems and applications that compete with the expensive corporate alternatives, right through to music, films and words - not for profit - but for everyone to use as they choose, and at their discretion. The price for this service? So negligible as to be as close to free as anyone might hope to achieve.

The world is unquestionably a better place for the novelty of these developments. Unless, of course, you happen to be entirely reliant on the captive market that results from the monopolistic or oligopolistic control of markets and distribution channels.

The international network of peer-to-peer users, Internet Relay Chatters and Instant Messengers consists of ordinary people who share freely and globally their local and individual forms of culture, music and ideas. The morality of doing so cannot be legislated, nor can any such legislation be realistically enforced, especially when the captive market on which that legislation depends no longer exists.

The P2P community is the embodiment of a global mass-rejection of the hard-copy, solid-state, media channels of yore that dictated, "Here, watch this, at this time, but only if you can afford it!" The old, inflexible, paradigm of controlled media distribution through specific channels has necessarily given way to worldwide networks of media consumers who listen to and watch what they want, when they want. This is the 'On demand' media utopia that multimedia always promised but that the media industries failed to deliver, instead choosing to rely on their captive audience remaining captive, despite technological revolutions greater than that of the industrial revolution which reversed that captivity forever.

Recently the media industries finally evolved enough to enter the digital media race, embarking on a game of catch-up in a competition that ended some time ago. That this is a fact, cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that the media companies, even in their international collective cabals with all their legal might, have little hope of closing the file-sharing floodgates now, or at any point in the future, for this would be similar in nature to the Sissyphean task of trying to persuade everyone that the Earth is flat.

And, while the likes of RIAA/MPAA, and their international cohorts around the world, pursue their ill thought out, self-defeating campaigns of issuing legal threats against their customers - the very same people who fund the media's existence and who include children, grandmothers and dead people - for the abominable charges of watching films and listening to music, a whole other world emerges outside of the boundaries of currently acceptable peer-to-peer debate. Until now.

The very collectivisation and faux-dedication of the multi-national media companies to their hopeless cause tells us far more about what has not entered the copyright discussion thus far than what has. Aside from nearly every song and every film ever made, peer-to-peer networks also contain nearly every operating system, software application, research paper, radio show, TV show, lecture, interview, talk, speech, script, document, thesis, legal document and just about every book of every kind in every language ever published.

Are we to presume that those who claim ownership of anything else that can be digitised, and which therefore cannot be owned or controlled as before, follow the same path as the media industries? With the benefit of logic, rationality, and the hindsight of evidence demonstrating the extreme inefficacy of this tactic, I think not.

If the Stick Doesn't Work, Try the Carrot

The multinational media companies openly state that the only reason legal threats are issued against anyone is to serve as a 'deterrent' to the peer-to-peer community that, in private at least, the media companies know they cannot dream of stopping. Naturally, the deterrent function of a handful of legal proceedings has failed and all manner of peer-to-peer, Internet and network statistics exist to support this position.

File-sharing traffic now constitutes almost 90% of all Internet traffic, and as more of the world comes online, the number of users that comprise that 90% of Internet traffic will increase exponentially. This in turn this renders the idea of continuing to issue legal proceedings against individual peer-to-peer users even more redundant than it would already appear to any right-minded business person unfamiliar with the bizarre practice of suing their customers.

As the efforts of media companies to herd customers who have escaped via a variety of alternative sources back into CD and vinyl pens with a big stick, ever greater numbers of people around the world are actively demonstrating their reluctance to be shepherded, either through extortion, victimisation, or otherwise, into paying artificially-inflated, cartel-inspired prices for things which they have become accustomed to accessing for considerably less.

Of course, the media industries will make big noises about each individual case of victimisation because the reality of the matter is that one user, 1,000 users, or even 1 million users is still less than one percent of the overall user base and will never approach being anything other than an insignificant statistic.

What if 50 million peer-to-peer users decided to join forces and issue legal proceedings against the media cartels for price-fixing and other easily provable predatory 'free-market' tactics used to hold media buyers hostage since the advent of the gramophone? There isn't a lawyer in the world that wouldn't leap at the chance to lead that prosecution.

The Economy of Community

A world of sensory experience that previously required considerable disposable income is now accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Those that stand to lose their self-appointed rights to that over which they had no legitimate claim originally will necessarily endeavour to hold back the unstoppable march of the progress which instantly dissolves their illegitimate and transparent claims to the right of eternal private profit at the public expense of everyone.

As file-sharing is vilified by those that wish to maintain the anachronistic status quo of a century of media control, it would be wise for the rest of us to remember that peer-to-peer networking and file-sharing liberates the media, information and knowledge for one and all, and that this liberation results in rapidly escalating levels of awareness and consciousness that serve the benefit of all humanity, albeit at the expense of those that desire otherwise. This, in part, is the menace of peer-to-peer networking.

The real menace of peer-to-peer networking and file-sharing as perceived by multi-national industries and governments alike, however, is not that files are being freely traded, but instead the direct and inevitable consequences of those files being traded.

The consequence of the digital revolution that has liberated information, knowledge and people, is that it challenges traditional profit-based market models. New, uncharted economic territory is being explored and the emerging economic models of this territory are so diverse from those we have known that they challenge the long-held positions of power and influence that multi-national corporations and governments have fought so long and hard against the people to preserve.

Everything wants to be free. If this wasn't the case, governments and corporations wouldn't have to go to such extreme lengths to make it not so. The new, emerging economic model of the Internet and file-sharing paradigm is now substantiating this claim as never before.

This is the power of sharing, co-operation and community, and it comes almost entirely free of artificially inflated charges.

There. It has been said. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has bolted. The banks have burst.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind", as Neil Armstrong once said.

'Evil' P2P - The One Microsoft Way

P2P is evil and the scourge of the Internet. Or so those that seek to part everyone from their hard earned cash at every available opportunity keep telling us.

Now, Microsoft enters the world of evil P2P with its own file-sharing software, codenamed 'Avalanche', which is based on Bram Cohen's well established and respected BitTorrent protocol.

Microsoft researchers said 'Avalanche' could be used to help distribute software and security patches, which The Antagonist finds rather odd because Microsoft recently invoked the nonsense DMCA against P2P group Downhill Battle for doing just that.

With regard to 'Avalanche' the software - Stable doors, horses and bolts.

In reality, it promises nothing that some bright kid somewhere won't improve upon immediately, if not before, 'Avalanche' starts rolling down the Microsoft mountain. Such is the fluid, dynamic and fast-paced nature of the Internet. So fast and fluid, in fact, that the traditional, behemothic industries of yore are finding it increasingly more difficult to compete and stay afloat.

The Internet paradigm has, since its inception, forged new, diverse, cooperative communities of inter-connected people that traditional supply/demand economic market models cannot entertain and simultaneously survive.

This new international community of peer-to-peer users, Internet Relay Chatters and Instant Messengers, where users of these services share globally their local and invidual forms of culture, music and ideas in a mass-rejection of the hard-copy, solid-state, media channels of yesterday, is now a living, breathing entity outside of anyone's direct control and it has high-speed access to the world's single biggest information resource.

This Internet community has built itself, almost from nothing, in the space of just 20 years and is only now starting to be recognised, or perhaps just openly acknowledged, by those that have denied it for so long, for the force (read: threat) of prominence and escalating conscience that is its very essence.

Those that stand to lose that over which they had no legitimate claim originally, will necessarily endeavour to hold back the unstoppable march of progress, or continue to jump on the bandwagon a short while after it's already too late.

Microsoft's 'Avalanche' is a shining example of the latter.

Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis & P2P

Word is that Michael Jackson might have to sell his ownership of rights to the back catalogue of Beatles and Elvis tracks to bail himself out of financial difficulties. Jackson owns half of Sony/ATV Music which owns the rights to 200,000 songs, which includes the Jackson-owned Beatles and Elvis catalogues. Sony's publishing business is worth in the region of $1 billion, 50 percent of which is attributable to Michael Jackson, himself reported to be worth somewhere around $150 million.

Apparently.

It beggars The Antagonist's belief that this continued assumption of ownership of vibrations in the airwaves, and the huge sums of money associated with so doing, can continue when anyone with a TV, radio, or PC and Internet connection can readily avail themselves of those very same vibrations.

Sure, a centralised bunch of media companies can wave around lots of bits of paper containing all sorts of legal jargon which implies ownership of everything ever recorded, but they can't really argue with a world-wide, decentralised, fully-redundant world of half-a-billion Internet users, who account for up to 85% of all Internet traffic, and who are all actively asserting a rather different paradigm.

Evidence shows they still haven't quite got it yet.

High Speed Multimedia Terrorism

Hey media industries, has The Antagonist got some news for you!

Reports of Internet transfer rates of "billion bits a second" and how "consumers could download an entire HD movie in about five minutes vs. today's 22 minutes."

Whatever evil spins the media corporates try and put on p2p or filesharing, even a click and a whopping 22 minutes to download a film wins hands down when compared to paying to sit on hold to a call centre for 22 minutes to pre-order tickets to a film - complete with additional booking fee for the privilege, of course - for which you still have to queue, possibly for another 22 minutes, to pick up when you've braved the elements and travelled, perhaps 22 or so more minutes, to get to wherever it is the film is showing. Then, after about 22 more minutes of adverts and general fluff that most of us could happily live without, along comes your film.

Which one would you choose?

In their infinite wisdom, the global media mafiaa are sticking to their clever strategy designed to see them through this passing Internet fad and have sued a few more multimedia terrorists... er... I mean a few more of the "upwards of 400 million peer to peer users worldwide".

The Antagonist will return soon with some clever statistics involving the numbers 9,000 (total law suits to date) and 400,000,000 (number of peer to peer users worldwide) just as soon as the abacus has been exponentially upgraded.

Bad Peer Days

It's been an interesting few days in the battle of big business versus the Internet-using population of the World.

First, in the run up to the MGM Vs Grokster case, owner of a number of content companies and the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, takes a financial stand against the really big content companies and pitches in monies to employ the legal services of Richard Taranto in arguing the EFF case for Grokster.

Next up, members of the U.S. Supreme Court express their concerns that allowing legal action to proceed against technology companies will stifle future technological progress. Intel agreed, and filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to be used on behalf of Grokster and the other defendants. The Intel brief explains:

"Imposing on innovators, such as Intel an obligation to anticipate potential uses of their innovations, to correctly guess which uses will predominate, and then to design their technologies to prevent infringing uses (even if it were technically and practically feasible to do so) would stifle innovation and dramatically increase the cost of such technologies and of the consumer and enterprise products based on those technologies."

Then, on the day EFF defends StreamCast Networks in front of the Supreme Court, Cuban writes another article questioning the logic behind the RIAA's claim that file-sharing causes a decline in sales.

Cuban goes one step further and says that all other forms of digital media - DVDs, Digital Photographs, Video Games, Software, and Ringtones - have all seen huge increases in sales, either in terms of monetary value, or actual units since the advent of P2P technology, and that any alleged decline in music sales is simply due to lost market share. When you consider the global media mafia's steadfast commitment to their die-not-adapt logic and the sales of non-RIAA-cartel releases popularised by the very peer to peer networks the media mafia are looking to destroy, this all makes perfect sense.

The media companies are fighting just about everyone they can, from members of the general public, to technology companies, to even other media companies who happen to demonstrate a greater understanding of the inherent nature of digital media and Internet technologies. And in this they've taken on the impossible task of stopping the unstoppable.

The world knew it back in the days of Napster. Mark Cuban knew it in the early days of broadcast.com. Maybe, soon, the global media mafia will realise it too.

Sony Vs Beatallica, Freedom and Creativity

Another example of the media industry's desire to stifle the world of creativity outside of its direct control exists with what's going on between a rather talented parody band called Beatallica and the media moguls at the Sony Corporation.

Formed in 2001 as a one-off Metallica tribute for a local festival, Beatallica came up with the idea of combining Beatles songs with Metallica's heavy-metal format and ended up recording and releasing around two album's worth of material for download. The Internet-word soon spread and Beatallica gained numerous fans around the world, all of which upset Sony Music who have now ordered Beatallica to Cease & Desist while seeking simultaneously to claim compensation for infringement of Beatles copyrights.

Luckily, the Internet is a long way from the passive market of consumers which Sony is used to manipulating and you can still download the excellent Beatallica tracks from metafilter.com, with lyrics available from lyrics-songs.com. Given that Beatallica have made their music freely available, there shouldn't be any problems with downloading it from your friendly file sharing network either.

While you're enjoying Beatallica's talents, do the world of freedom, innovation and creativity a favour, join the other 10,000 or so people with a sense of reason, and go now and sign the online petition requesting Sony to retract their Cease and Desist order against beatallica.org and beatallica.com (both of which, at the time of writing, were offline thanks to Sony's actions, unlike Beatallica's messageboard).

The case is still ongoing and Metallica's Lars Ulrich recently got involved offering Beatallica his support. Mr Ulrich is famous for his role as drummer in Metallica, and a little more famous in some circles for being the chief Anti-Napster spokesman in the Napster witch-hunts of yester-year. This is before Metallica realised the error of their ways, did a complete U-turn, and began releasing Metallica material for download, so who knows quite what's going to happen next.

Update: I just found All Along The Blog Tower which promises, "All Beatallica. All the time. At least until Sony sues me" which includes, amongst other things, an amusing list of possible titles for songs on Beatallica's next album. Dude, dude, let's hope we don't get sued...

Global Free Trade Under Threat From Corporate Greed

On 28th February The Register reported that: "The market for downloaded music is strong enough to take a price rise, according to the major music labels." This might lead people to believe that all is going well in the corporate music world. Apparently, not so.

Less than two weeks later, and under the banner of 'Music industry 'nails UK pirates', the results of the British Phonographic Industry's first round of threatening to sue peer-to-peer users are announced as 23 people pay up for file-sharing.

As the BPI follow the lead of the RIAA, and more recently, the MPAA and the actions of a number of other slightly lower profile cases in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada, the global media Mafia step-up their campaign to ensure the music download market will sustain the same sort of cartel-inspired, artificially inflated prices that the media industries have always managed to impose on their captive audience.

The use of the word 'pirate' to describe a range of people who include a student, the director of an IT company, and a local councilor, who range in age from 22 to 58, strikes me as rather strange for a 'pirate' is one who preys on others.

Picture, if you will, groups of cocaine-snorting, cross media-industry representatives at a lavish industry gathering, quaffing bottles of champagne that cost more than most music consumers pay to keep a roof over their heads each month, rejoicing at how well music sales are going and how nicely online sales are now they've finally got round to figuring out a little bit about how this new Internet thing works, and wondering still how maybe they can make themselves all just that little bit richer, even if it is at the expense of the very people that gave them all their money in the first place.

Then picture a 22 year old student sat at home with a PC and an Internet connection. Their favourite band has released a new single. She's bought all their previous albums and singles and even a couple of solo efforts by various members of the band, and now the papers, the magazines and just about everyone else is raving about how good the new single is. But, the last thing that the budget will stretch to is a new CD, no matter how desirable it might be. After searching the Internet for a while the student manages to find the new song for download and, after waiting for it to download, she finally gets to listen to the much hyped song.

Now picture the former threatening the latter with legal proceedings and fines of thousands of pounds on the basis that she is a pirate.

In any case where the former, a group of incredibly wealthy media organisations with billions of pounds/dollars/euros/etc at their disposal, are threatening and intimidating the latter, an impoverished, student trying to scrape her way through college, or indeed any other individual with less material wealth than say, whatever a reasonable, current value for habitable accommodation to suit their circumstance might be, the only possible discernible 'piracy', or 'preying on others' occurring is that which is being orchestrated by the media corporations, en masse, against comparatively defenseless individuals.

The sad irony of the music business suing their customers is that artists create to share their passions with others and any artist will willingly admit that their art is nothing without an audience to appreciate it. The more people that have an opportunity to experience and appreciate an artist's work, by whatever means available, so much greater will the success of the artist be. Conversely, if you've never heard of an artist, you're never likely to buy their CD, or tell your friends about them and buy a bunch of tickets to their concert.

The media industry versus peer-to-peer file-sharing battle has nothing to do with piracy.

The industry openly admits that business is booming and getting better all the time, whether this be despite the existence of peer-to-peer networks, or as a direct result of artists obtaining increased exposure via them.

The media industry versus peer-to-peer file-sharing battle is one of control.

Control the supply in a market driven economy and you control the market. What anyone with a passing interest in peer-to-peer developments is witnessing now is a frantic and desperate attempt by the media conglomerates to maintain control of the artificial marketplace they created and which was, until very recently, beyond the bounds of any serious threat.

Technologies like peer-to-peer file-sharing are the ultimate in capitalist, free-market fantasies - international and operating without let or hindrance the world over in the true sense of the word free. If the multi-million dollar entertainment industry is too bloated to keep up with this and other media revolutions without dictating what the world can and can't do online, and has to die as a result, so be it.

By liberating the media marketplace, file-sharing has opened up a whole new world of direct-to-audience opportunities for artists everywhere for it is after all 'audiences' that true artists seek, not the 'demographics' media oligopolies seek to control with their every action.

The transition to this new media age may not be smooth but when anyone with access to camcorder, a computer and an Internet connection can make and distribute films and music of equal and better quality to that available elsewhere at artificially inflated prices, we are all assured a far more diverse and interesting media future.

P2P Vs the 0.01 Percent-ers

In a recent blog entry The Antagonist wrote how, if the music industry continues to demonstrate its historical recalcitrance to adapt in the face of unstoppable technological novelty, specifically with regard to digital media, it is doomed. This is especially true when these technological novelties occur with insistent regularity, are entirely unstoppable, and they lead to exponential increases in the ease and pace at which media can be digitised and distributed.

In February of 2001 the world knew that Sean Fanning's Napster network had over 60 million registered users worldwide. Despite the availability of this information and knowing that there could be nearly that many users in America alone, the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) launched the first found of law suits against 261 peer to peer users in September 2003 amid a blaze of publicity - publicity designed to distract from the lack of substance and logic behind the action and in a shock-tactic attempt to deter other peer-to-peer users from file-sharing.

In just over two years the RIAA has fired off another dozen or so rounds of law suits, with accompanying media frenzy, at varying numbers of individuals in America. Recent Wired News coverage of similar actions by the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) suggests that the RIAA has filed more than 6,000 lawsuits against individuals to date.

In the two years the RIAA has been issuing legal threats, a lot else has happened. One of these things is a broadband revolution and another is the release of a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project entitled "A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American Life". The report claims that 128 million people aged 18 and over form the basis of the American Internet population and that 29% of them regularly download and share music. This equates to over 37,000,000 file-sharers in America alone, and that's without including figures for those under 18 years of age.

Seeing as the RIAA have dictated that we include under-18s by firing law suits at 12-year olds, we must also try to account for them here. The Pew report tells us that almost 30% of 18-29 year olds participate in file-sharing and I think it's safe to guess that the figure would be at least as many again in the 12-17 year old range, 87% of whom are regular Internet users. Whichever way you look at it, 37 million file sharers is a hellishly conservative estimate and figures of at least double that, in America alone, are eminently possible when considering that computers and Internet connections are regularly shared among an arbitrary number of family members.

So, we have around 60-80 million peer-to-peer users in America, ISPs and communications companies claiming that as much as 80% of all network traffic is peer-to-peer related, and the RIAA playing a veritable game of Sissyphean catch-up with 6,000-8,000 threats of legal action issued.

By The Antagonist's quick and ready reckoning this is less than 0.01% of the filesharing population in America and it's taken a little over two years to 'achieve'. In light of these facts and the apparent commitment of the RIAA to this flawed logic of suing customers, some might also wonder about the logistics of issuing legal threats against the remaining 99.99% of American peer-to-peer users. What about people that don't want to settle out of court? That's a lot of court cases. Oh, and what about peer to peer users in the rest of free world?

Even Intellectual Property advisors seem to think the RIAA and MPAA are misguided in both action and intention. Intellectual Property Law & Business, in an article headed Don't Sue The Customers, says the number of legal threats issued by the RIAA is "at 4,280 and counting" with the analysis that "evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing".

4,280 and counting. It's a long way from 4,280 to the 37,000,000 confirmed users and even further still to the 60,000,000 suggested by Intellectual Property Law & Business. Their recomendation? The only sensible one for the RIAA, MPAA and their global counterparts - that they give up their "dreams of controlling distribution in favor of collecting fair compensation".

In any form of business, you have to be one step ahead of the competition. When the competition is free, you've got your work cut out to survive. Instead of attempting to sue their customers, the conglomerates should be looking to provide some of that ever-elusive 'value-add' that all businesses claim to offer and all consumers seek to find. Until then, they're on a road to nowhere.

"The music industry is shit-scared of the Internet"

These were the words a Sony Music executive uttered to The Register back in 1998. Seven years and lots of legal threats later, not much appears to have changed if the furore about Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang is anything to go by. Wang's book explains, in old fashioned printing-press form, how to use a bunch of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for finding whatever it is a user of these networks might be looking for.

So what? Well, the hubbub that surrounds this book brings me to a pertinent point that doesn't seem to have received a whole lot of coverage in the peer-to-peer debate thus far, and it's a point that needs bringing to the consiousness of the masses before we all lose sight of the facts, such as they are.

Traditional media coverage of peer-to-peer networking technologies and issues has concentrated on the trading of music as MP3 files thanks to the narrow focus afforded to the issue by the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) in their various attempts to sue peer-to-peer users in America. More recently, the trading of movies has entered the peer-to-peer debate thanks to moves by the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) to follow the RIAA's lead in attempting to sue users of peer-to-peer networks.

However, this isn't quite the full story. In fact, it's quite a long way from the full story because peer-to-peer technologies are far more useful than a cursory glance at the actions of the RIAA/MPAA would first suggest. These two organisations represent the interests of the music and film industries - in America - and that's it!

Peer-to-peer networks aren't quite so limited in their scope - they can carry music and films, and they can also carry books, games, applications, utilities, talks, speeches, presentations, photographs - in fact, anything that can be turned into a file on a computer. Not only that, but file sharing networks enable these files to be distributed far beyond the borders and industries within which the jurisdictions of the likes of the RIAA and MPAA fall.

So, what happens to all the games, books and software that end up on peer to peer networks? What about shared music, films, games, books and applications in all the countries in the world outside of America?

As a result of the misguided efforts of the RIAA and MPAA, the laborious and costly process of finding a source of potential infringement, attempting to locate the specific individual responsible, and issuing proceedings against that individual has been born. Each stage of the process is fraught with well documented difficulties and, thus far, we're only talking about music and films being traded within America's borders. Nor have we accounted for the process of dragging each of these alleged infringers through the courts.

This convoluted process might work relatively well for a handful of individuals in a single country, but try applyling the concept to the ever-growing millions upon millions of peer-to-peer users users that span the globe and that share music, films, games, applications, books, etc., and you can see how the notion of each industry suing alleged offenders quickly renders itself entirely redundant. Really, people, you can't sue everyone, everywhere, forevermore.

The RIAA have thrown their weight around on a few high profile occasions in true 'women and children first' fashion by suing kids, mothers and even dead grandmothers. Now the MPAA are adopting the same approach as the music industry in their quest to maintain the huge profits that holding a captive audience to ransom for decades has allowed them to reap and are suing their customers too.

Sure, both the RIAA and MPAA are big, scary organisations with lots of money at their disposal to protect their highly profitable racketeering industries - and if you've bought or rented any music or films, ever, it's your money. In reality, their only weapon is fear, and by committing themselves to this perverse die-not-adapt logic, the music and film industries of America have decisively committed to a superbly flawed method of attempting to preserve themselves in the face of technological developments that they cannot hope to survive in their existing incarnations.

As Wang writes (and anyone with a decent grasp of simple logic can fathom):

"The bottom line is that the corporations, who currently hold all the power and make most of the money, are going to have to change, and that's something they aren't willing to do."

In reality, change is something that the corporations should have embraced a long time ago when MP3 evolution and MP3 portability were fledgling technologies. For the best part of ten years change hasn't been an option and, as Wang concludes in his book:

"The question isn't whether file sharing technology will put today's corporate powerhouses out of business. The question is when, and that future is closer than they think."

Of this fact peer-to-peer users everywhere should take heed.

The media giants have made their choices and decided that they would rather die than adapt. In sounding their own death knell the corporate behemoths have also issued a resounding message to peer-to-peer users everywhere - share your files or we've won.

--
Note: A sample chapter of Steal This File Sharing Book offering an overview of the peer-to-peer file-sharing network technologies is available from the No Starch web site for anyone that's interested. No doubt a full version of the book will be available on your friendly file sharing network soon!