The guys behind The Pirate Bay got around to making a movie of their own, called Steal this Film! (download it with your favorite BitTorrent client from here, if you don’t have a BT client installed check out Azureus). If you don’t know TPB, it is one of the world’s major BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.

In it, they give their view on “piracy” in general and what happened around the raid on the Pirate Bay machines last summer (a resounding victory for the MPAA - the Pirate Bay was down for a full three days although it has been rebuilt to be more, err, “fault-tolerant”). It shows how heavy-handed lobbying will get even the most democratic government to walk on the USofA’s leash, stepping over minor issues like separation of powers and a legal basis for a confiscation.

It’s good that Sweden, at least, seems to have an active lobby and even a political party around the issues of abuse of copyrights (and, related, patents). The raid and subsequent public uproar in Sweden maybe even have given the PP a chance to land seats in parliament, and it looks like the movement is spreading, too. (a nice effect of this is hopefully that the totally ludicrous label “piracy” will lose its weight by the “pirates” adopting the title). It’s worth reading the English bits of the site - they have some practical ideas on getting rid of the current IP laws.

(oh, and in case you have concerns about your privacy, I can attest to the fact that the Pirate Party’s anonymous VPN service works. The only drawback so far is that I get Google in Swedish )

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Stuff on the Web, In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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