Swedish Museum Puts Pirate Bay Server On Display

The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology has put the server from The Pirate Bay on display. The server was confiscated in a police raid last year. The museum bought the server for 2,000 kronor ($240) from a member of the Bureau of Piracy, a Swedish group seeking the decriminalization of filesharing. "This is an object of contemporary society and a museum collects such items, and it is a part of our mission as a museum not to avoid complicated questions," curator Nils Olander said. The display is 98% complete and the museum staff has been waiting on a seeder since Thursday.

Comments

Re:End of an era?

[nametaken]

Someday someone will figure out how to do untraceable swarm downloading that works at an acceptable speed, it will be easy to use, it will gain critical mass, and then it's all over.

That will be the deathblow.

Whatever else you can say

[Presto Vivace]

this is an important part of Swedish and technology history, it belongs in a museum.

Re:End of an era?

[Mr2001]

How exactly would this make it "commercially viable to create content" since only one copy will be sold?

Simple: authors would stop trying to sell copies, and instead focus on selling their labor.

In the digital era, copies are not valuable. A copy of an e-book is worth little more than the media it's stored on. The act of writing, however, still has value -- you can't make authors write for free, so if you want to read anything new, you're gonna have to pay someone to write it. And the same technology that makes it easy to distribute free copies to lots of people can also make it easy for lots of people to pool their money and fund production of new works.