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

End of an era?

[Z00L00K]

Maybe this and the outcome will mark the end of an era, much like Napster once.

We are just waiting for the next big thing in file sharing.

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.

Re:End of an era?

[geekoid]

That can't work for the same reason DRM can't work.
Everything is traceable if it is going some where that needs to have someone read it.

Re:End of an era?

[DangerFace]

Yeah, for those few of us that get decent upload speeds and an unlimited quantity of transfer. The main problem with filesharing isn't really the protocols or the legal rubbish, since they can't fit millions of people into a courtroom without taking so long the original ones are back out and have had kids that are now also seeding. The problem is that most people have rubbish internet connections and don't really grasp how torrenting et al work - most people just don't get that the more you upload the faster your download will be. Anyways, that's my two cents.

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

No, it will be the deathblow when people start to openly defy copyright, instead of doing the equivalent today what used to be sneaking into the whites only area back then for a black person. We need people to oppose copyright the way Rosa Parks sat on the bus.

(I do consider the current copyright regime bad on almost the same level as apartheid used to be. Putting ambigous monopoly on information is not only paramountly stupid in the information age, but causes the very real retardation of our culture. How could we have an open and enlightened society with artificial monopolies in place and patent law retarding scientific progress?)

Re:End of an era?

[Stile 65]

I2P. It works well as long as *enough* people port-forward, but it doesn't require port-forwarding from any specific individual.

Re:End of an era?

[flonker]

I've been wondering for a long time, what's to stop someone from using UDP packets with a forged source IP? You can even stick the IP on the same /24 or /25 or whatever, and give credit to the /24 or /25 in a bit torrent like tit-for-tat scheme. Uploading would then be "semi-anonymous". The main issues I see are: ISPs may not like it, and egress filtering may be an issue, although I think that limiting it to /24 would minimize that.

Re:End of an era?

[zach297]

Really? I have expirenced the exact opposite. I can upload at about 60 KBytes/s but my downloads are extremely slow unless I limit the uploads to around 20 KBytes/s. Maybe there is some part of torrents that I am mistaken about.

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

Would it? Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.

Not much would change from the author-publisher relation's perspective, since people still want to read books, listen to music, etc. and are willing to pay for that, but the author would be free to work with whatever idea he/she has and the end-user wouldn't be restricted.

*Most things are incremental improvements over some older content, this is an often missed point. Pretty much everything is a derivative work of the culture the author lives in. Focusing on the soletary author is missing the forest from the tree.

Re:End of an era?

[clarkkent09]

Without copyright, it is not only commercially viable to create* content, but would lead to a much healthier, competitive environment aswell.

Care to elaborate? Let's take an example: some entrepreneurial guy puts up freeamazon.com - same as amazon.com except that all the content (well, at least books, movies, software and music - thinks that can be copied easily) is free. The way it's done is simple, each new release is bought and a free copy is posted so that anybody can download it for free. Perhaps the owner of the site doesn't even need to buy it, simply provide a place for someone to upload. Surely without copyright this would happen very quickly since the site would receive enormous traffic and the owners would get rich. How exactly would this make it "commercially viable to create content" since only one copy will be sold? How would it lead to a "healthier, competitive environment"?

Re:End of an era?

[slack_prad]

would you rather pay for tools to commit copyright infringement rather than pay for the copyrighted content outright?

whichever is less?

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.

Re:End of an era?

[theheadlessrabbit]

because the 99% of artists who don't manage to sell enough to make a living would now be on equal footing with the 1% who have major advertising dollars behind them. throw on a Slashdot style moderation system to bury the crap and promote the gems, and you've got a viable system for promoting your ideas.

your failure to monetize content in a digital marketplace is not my problem. if media can be copied perfectly, and for free, no artificial limitations will be successful. content creators will be forced to make money on things that are not infinitely reproducible.

record sales are crashing, yet i can still go to nearly any bar and see a local band play.
TV ratings are down, I can still go on youtube and find some great content (ted talks come to mind)

Re:End of an era?

[A beautiful mind]

What's the advantage of being first to market when your competitor is offering exactly the same copy for free the very next day or even hour. Remember, there is no DRM, no barriers whatsoever to making as many copies as you want and distributing as far and wide if you like. In theory the first person to buy it will post a copy of it online so everybody else can download it for free. How do you get the endorsement from the author? You pay them for it? How, if you don't have any expectation of profit?

Once again, digital and deadtree has to be separated. In the digital world you don't care if things get distributed or not. Convenience rules. Subscription/deviced based services rule. Take the Kindle or the Apple iPod + iStore. There are copies available for free within minutes of anything that has been produced in a digital form. Apple seems to be doing just fine with the iStore though. Abolishing copyright would decriminalize the masses, while stores like that would still work based on the convenience factor. You're not paying for the music, you're paying for the convenience of having an easily accessible online repository of music you can sync to your iPod easily.

Your example of what happens in deadtree world (such as with 911 report) just proves my point. The only reason that works is exactly what you say, obstacles in copying, formatting etc. If making copying difficult is what you want, then you should be in favor of some flavor of copy protection software (gasp DRM?) that makes copying difficult or impossible, right? But aren't those obstacles exactly what you want to remove?

In a world without copyright, DRM would be mostly pointless aswell. Sure, you can try to make your competitor's job harder, but you can't make it impossible and it costs you to do so. I didn't say that making copying difficult is a goal. Even without the advantage of being first on the market and being the official publisher, it would still be worth it for publishers to publish books and pay the authors for it. Publishers don't need the artificial and destructive monopoly copyright creates. Competition is good.

Re:End of an era?

[PachmanP]

ou mention your local band, but I bet they are only playing in your local bar because they are hoping that they will some day be able to get a bigger audience and more money, and this, until a better alternative is found, still involves copyright.

Well they get a bigger audience and play bigger shows. We currently lack the ability to really reproduce the experience of being at a concert with out said band. Now once we get VR/holodeck then the bands are probably straight out of luck, but I am of the opinion that society will collapse shortly after the invention of the holodeck/matrix. You'd never get a guy out of "Buxom Women Who Want To Please You" program, and humanity would die off.

Re:End of an era?

[Pentium100]

Except that patents expire quite fast (compared to copyrights) or we would still be paying Tesla for AC generator and Edison for the light bulb. I don't think that society would progress very far if it was like that.

Re:End of an era?

[arkhan_jg]

Your analogy is flawed somewhat, as most people still prefer paper books to ebooks, but lets ignore that for the moment.

Look at the Baen Free Library - the authors themselves put up books for free download, in a variety of DRM-free formats. Every time an author does this, they see massive spikes in sales of their other books, *including* the book they put up for free. They also sell ebooks via webscriptions - and you know what? Those *also* see spikes in sales. They like libraries, and they like people lending their books around - they'd rather be read than forgotten, and getting someone to like your existing work makes them more likely to buy future works. Compare and contrast to the games industry, for example, which treats legal 2nd hand sales like copyright infringement, with DRM etc to prevent it if at all possible (steam, I'm looking at you too)

The truth is with publishing is there's very little long-tail. Unless you're a mega author, The sales you get in the first year are pretty much the vast majority of the money you'll ever make from that title. The trick is to get more people interested in your work in the first place, so that they go on to buy your back catalog.

Free illegal online stuff suffers from this too. The latest and greatest is where all the seeders are; try getting old or obscure stuff on the pirate bay, and you'll see that the field is littered with dead torrents, the seeders long having since gone away. That's somewhere that sellers have a niche; use the latest free stuff (which you don't even have to pay bandwidth for!) as a loss leader for your other works, which you sell, easily and DRM free. Convenience has value too - itunes thrives in a world where they're competiting with free, because it's more easily available, better catalogued, and because people are generally good and want to pay artists if they can. Those that won't pay, were *never your customers in the first place* so worrying about them is simply wasting your effort.

Hell, radio and TV has survived a good long time giving it all away for free, and doing adverts alongside it. the BBC iplayer (paid for by existing TV licences) and Hulu (adverts) are two examples of taking their existing model and doing it online. OK, you might be able to go and get the ad-free version online too, but if it's right *there* and fast and convenient, loads of people will put up with ads and go to the original source.

But ultimately, this is all irrelevent. lets imagine this freemazon, a giant library of all the published works of mankind, from the banal comedy to the greatest works of visual and written arts of history. Every book, film, TV, piece of music ever written available free to be enjoyed and to enlighten the public for all time, for them to draw inspiration from and create their own works.

I have a better name for it. The Public Domain. What copyright is FOR. We want this wonderful, amazing Public Domain for the benefit of the public. Lets create an incentive for people to create works and put them out there for everyone to enjoy. Copying is hard since you need a printing press, so we'll put the incentive there - you can be the only one allowed to print your works for a limited time, make some money, then it goes in the public domain. The public give something up (copyright is a limit on free speech; without copyright I'd just be using my free speech rights to say what I like, even if it is sharing something you wrote) and they get something back in return.

Copyright is supposed to be about the richness of the public domain; it's an incentive mechanism to get works into it. Now though, it's like a feudal system; serfs do all the work, and the barons take all the works themselves, and the serfs if they're lucky get to keep a fraction for their own benefit, while the general public only get what the barons allow them to have.

Copyright is the new feudal system; artists slave away for virtually no gain, and the public is robbed of its public domain with

Re:End of an era?

[tingeber]

So, for example, Amazon could pay x thousand dollars to, let's say, Stephen King for a new novel, give it away for free on their website and make money off of ads and other purchases, like hard copies of the book, merchandising et al.

It actually seems like a good plan.

Whatever else you can say

[Presto Vivace]

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

Re:Whatever else you can say

[illumastorm]

So do you, Dr Jones.

Re:Whatever else you can say

[Sidshow]

I would compare this to having the weapon that fired the first shot in a civil war. Though the object itself has no true value, it is a symbol of the events that are taking place. No matter how this battle turns out or who win's it is important to remember that the fight took place so we don't repeat the conflict over and over in the future.

No specs and/or pictures...

[__aaclcg7560]

I was kinda of hoping that the article had specs and/or pictures on the server hardware. I think a real computer pirate would have one the best hardware money can buy or a knock-off server from the old Soviet Union.

Re:No specs and/or pictures...

[sznupi]

There's a picture in BBC article abiut the outcome of trial:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8003799.stm

How exactly did the musuem acquire it?

[KW802]

The article says that the server was confiscated by the police; with that in mind, and the fact that the trial was still going underway today, then how did the server leave the possession of the police and wind up with the Bureau of Piracy?

Awesome summary

[erroneus]

"The display is 98% complete and the museum staff has been waiting on a seeder since Thursday. "

THAT is classic.