I've been following the court case of the team from PirateBay P2P File Sharing service with some amazement. Firsly they had half of the charges against them dropped on the first day of their prosecution and secondly the Swedish team behind it seem more intent on having huge parties before any decision has been arrived at.. how liberating!
Anyway, it seems that the organic and non-hierarchical oganisation structure of the company may prove to be their saviour. It seems that on Thursday the case prosecutor had some difficulty understanding how the collaborative organisation of the site worked.
In an effort to understand who the boss was, when asked "But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic" the defendant Fredrik Neij answered "No. Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it." Humourous stuff perhaps... but it may also be intersting to see how the Swedish legal system copes with allocating blame in a crowdsourced situation.
Showing posts with label pirate bay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pirate bay. Show all posts
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Could torrents save newspapers?
For those who don't know what a Bit Torrent is, I'll just quickly explain that its a Per-to-peer file sharing service that enable you to download large files from a collection of smaller ones scattered across the Internet.
Note:
I'll not visit the legality of the issue or where intellectual theft occurs when you download a copyrighted / licensed file such as some software or a digitally encoded movie. Suffice to say its enough of an issue to get those who run sites thank link off to these collection of files (torrents) in enough trouble from official bodies. But exist they do and you don't have to download illegal material from them (although you do have to wonder why they name themselves 'Pirate Bay', etc. )
Instead you can use them as a new distribution method, or so one Swedish newspaper thinks . Sydsvenskan (no, don't ask me to pronounce it, I have enough trouble reading the credits on my DVD collection) has started distributing a nicely produced PDF of its newspaper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/20/bittorrent-newspaperformats
However the jury is still out on whether this legal use of P2P technology is actually worth it, let alone a sensible business model (e.g. if it was, why aren't other media companies doing this more?)
Note:
I'll not visit the legality of the issue or where intellectual theft occurs when you download a copyrighted / licensed file such as some software or a digitally encoded movie. Suffice to say its enough of an issue to get those who run sites thank link off to these collection of files (torrents) in enough trouble from official bodies. But exist they do and you don't have to download illegal material from them (although you do have to wonder why they name themselves 'Pirate Bay', etc. )
Instead you can use them as a new distribution method, or so one Swedish newspaper thinks . Sydsvenskan (no, don't ask me to pronounce it, I have enough trouble reading the credits on my DVD collection) has started distributing a nicely produced PDF of its newspaper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/20/bittorrent-newspaperformats
However the jury is still out on whether this legal use of P2P technology is actually worth it, let alone a sensible business model (e.g. if it was, why aren't other media companies doing this more?)
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