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The Pirate Bay Turns 15 (torrentfreak.com)
Sometime about 15 years ago, a group of hackers and activists launched The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrent search engine. TorrentFreak: While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyran, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures.
One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyran. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information. The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM.
One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyran. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information. The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM.
Thanks, I found there content unavailable anywhere else on the internet. Old books, comics, movies.
Were we thought in the future everyone would be able to permanently own a copy of their favorite movie/tv show/album. We figured in the future artists would still be paid gratis (e.g. 'you are my faviorate here is $30 donation please make another album!') But the digital information would be free, in the future anyone would be able to access any movie ever made for free, and maybe only be 'forced' to pay if they wanted HD quality of the latest episode/release. We figured all this increased internet freedom would bring the copyright regime tumbling down, and finally we would have the necessary reform that would allow derivative works like fanfics/fanart and remixes to flourish on the interwebs instead of being shut down.
15 years later and you either need a subscription to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu etc. to maybe watch a couple of movies you might like that may or may not be available that month. Otherwise you are stuck with a box under your TV that demands you pay $5.99-$9.99 EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to watch your favorite action movie. The oppressive copyright regime marches on into new territories and countries, with the US government sending agents to arrest teenagers in countries where its not even illegal to share files online. Youtube continues to take down videos for using 15 seconds of video that is declared 'infringing' even when the included content is not even owned by the party that flagged it to be taken down. Heck this happens even when the content is in the public domain! The same thing happened to music, with more people volunteering to pay for limited streaming access to a library instead of just sharing their favorite tracks with friends.
Instead of technology making us more free it helped the oligarchs to control us even more.