Resistance Studies

Christopher Kullenberg July 7th, 2007

The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent tracker, which means that it only stores meta-data that helps people download files from other people’s harddrives. Since people who join this network often share music, videos and software which is copyrighted, many actors are trying to shut it down. Last year the police raided the servers of the Pirate Bay, however it took only a few days before it was up an running again, thanks to the portability of internet communication.

Last time the argument for shutting down this infrastructure was the violation of copyrights. This time the argument is child pornography. According to the police, The Pirate Bay is a way of spreading illegal pornography, and thus the site has been added to a special list which blocks thepiratebay.org for ordinary users. Of course, this has nothing to do with child pornography. Other infrastructures that probably spread more is Google, MSN, and other ways of connecting computers on the net.

It is interesting to see what it takes to promote censorship. Two good stratagies are either to call it terrorism or child pornography. Both of them have made the legislators go crazy, from such abnormalities as the Patriot act, to the ISP block lists for sites that are considered to host illegal porn.

However, if I know the Pirate Bay correctly, there will probably be an interesting and creative solution to this problem. Just like last time!

Read more (Swedish):

Copyriot

Oscar Swartz

• Anonymity , Censorship , Technology , Terrorism
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