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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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