Upload of 18 592 Scientific Documents to the Pirate Bay

A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

The torrent consists of documents from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the copyright to which has long since expired. However, the only way to access these documents until now has been via JSTOR, as Maxwell explains in a long and eloquent text on the Pirate Bay, with individual articles costing as much as $19. “Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he writes.

Maxwell goes on to explain that he gained access to the documents years ago in what he says was a legal manner, but he was afraid to publish them because of potential legal repercussions from the publishers of scientific journals. He says the indictment of Swartz, who allegedly tried to download thousands of files from JSTOR through the library at MIT, made him change his mind:


"This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents. These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society's prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction, scanning the documents created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge as their lofty mission statements suggest but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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Pirate Philosophy- steal this!

Pirate Philosophy explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy are affecting ideas of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use, patent, trademark, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet.

Professor Gary Hall looks at a number of ways in which the Arts and Humanities can engage their ideas outside of the traditional field of academic publishing, and how open access has the potential to liberate academia from its many constraints.

Please liberate/pirate this lecture from us, and feel free to remix it and do whatever you want with it.

Visit http://www.garyhall.info/ to find out more about Gary's work or visit http://coventryuniversity.podbean.com/ to find more great Coventry University lectures and talks

What is Streaming?

At the university where I work we have an ongoing conversation about what is a 'meeting'. In our course planning for teaching we have to specify how many meetings a student can expect to have with the lecturer during a course. For distance courses these meetings can take a number of forms; a video conference, a chat session, a Skype meeting and so on. Being a language studies department we bang on about what words mean all the time. What is a meeting if you do not share space? I think it is interesting and that's probably why I work there.

Today I read an article online from the Swedish Television 'Culture News' about how file sharing has decreased by fifty percent in two years. Sounds impressive. The article goes on to state that streaming has gone up a huge amount (well from five percent of traffic to twenty six percent). So the text makes the conclusion that those that were once file sharing in order to consume media are now streaming it. It seems logical, but then I came across this article:

One of the big downsides of BitTorrent is that you have to be patient. Streams from Hulu start after a few seconds of buffering. Download a file from a torrent site, on the other hand, and you’ll often have to wait hours before you can start watching. “It’s a painful experience for users,” admitted BitTorrent Inc. VP Simon Morris in a recent interview with NewTeeVee, adding that BitTorrent has been pretty much “point-click-wait” instead of the “point-click-watch” experience people now expect from web video.

BitTorrent Inc. is now trying to tackle this issue with a new streaming feature in its flagship uTorrent client. Of course, this isn’t the first attempt to make BitTorrent a little more of an instantaneous experience. In fact, there are a number of ways you can stream your torrents. We tested a number of them and compiled a quick list of five ways to get your streams on. Five Ways to Stream Your Torrents

So people who are using torrents are also streaming. With the recent announcement by the Pirate Bay that they are abandoning the torrent tracker all together in favor of magnetic torrents, it seems that the Culture News is just following the pattern that is pretty much established in relation to file sharing. Technical innovation remains ahead of both legal structure and social reality at large.

The boundaries between one form of information distribution and another over web protocols are difficult to set. The meaning of 'streaming' is based on technical characteristic that seem to be fast becoming obsolete. Streaming will be the new file sharing.

A Letter to Mandy

An open letter to Peter Mandelson regarding the newly announced Digital Economy Bill.

Dear Peter Mandelson,

I've been following your recent policy proposals, so now they've gone through, I thought I'd contribute some vocals. The focal point of my criticism's the ridiculous decision to bring in a system where you flick a switch and disconnect the internet when it's suspected that intellectual infringement has been detected, even if the relatives they live with definitely didn't. I think it's in your best interest to bin this, yes? 'Cause isn't it a respected institution that we're considered innocent unless different is proven? Er, excuse me - how can you excuse exclusion when you've not pursued a definite conclusion?

You're picking on the little man, the Lilliputian; now there's a pain in my gulliver and it's confusing. You're swift to treat your citizens with such little human humour it's no wonder that we're disilliusioned. This resolution's gonna end in revolution just like any other governance that doesn't accept evolution. To be perfectly honest, m'lord, there'd be less intrusion if you curtly abolished the law and left us to it.

And why do games require safety ratings, but any age can see adult-aimed plays and paintings? It's state censorship, the same as Beijing; but even China thinks a pirate isn't worth the time of day for chasing. I think Chairman Mao would say the same thing - since you became secretary, it's like the state's your plaything. You made a massive sacrifice, invaded loads of privacy, but if I wanted to download, there'd be no hope of finding me. I could take my mobile phone to the local library, and utilise the free wireless to find the file I need. Then what are you going to try - to disconnect their ISP? You might as well just burn the books on rights to speech.

Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull. Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull.

Who'll profit from the Digital Economy Bill? Not the public, but the profiteers probably will. Who'll profit from the Digital Economy Bill? Not the public, but the puppeteers probably will. I've talked about how intellectual property kills and you're still just concerned with who's copping the bill. It's quite obvious you've been lobbied until the copy holders got control, and you're probably their shill. It's not your problem when you're positioned on top of the hill, in your property that probably cost a couple of mil. But wake up and smell the coffee, the milk is going off and you're not bothered 'cause your coffers are filled.

Lord, it's time you took an honesty pill, and acknowledged the majority aren't horribly thrilled. So what if I watched a torrented comedy film? I don't need to now my country's just become a Brazil. You know the truth, Orwell spoke his views, your House broke the news and all Hell's broken loose. The utopia we hoped for is overdue, so could you help out a little bit and don't be stupid?

The onus is on you to show us you aren't using your throne in a way the voters don't approve. I know you're very close to David Geffen, so maybe his interests have given you a hazed perception. Hey, do you reckon you'd win today's election, considering you're chasing this amidst a great recession? Deception's the politician's favourite weapon but we're already jaded from one too many painful lessons.

Dear Mandy, stay away from my family. Yours considerably angrily, Dan Bull. Dear Mandy, stay away from my family.

Yours considerably angrily,
Dan Bull.

P.S. I love you, Mandy x

---------------------------------------- -------------------------------------
Samples used:
Lily Allen - Never Gonna Happen
Lily Allen - Who'd Have Known

If you disapprove of the Bill, sign the petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dont...

Write your own message to Lord Mandelson at http://threestrikes.openrightsgroup.org/

Download the mp3: http://www.zshare.net/audio/69029460c...

Buy or download Dan Bull's debut album Safe from
http://www.freshnut.co.uk/shop

Follow Dan on Twitter @itsDanBull - share the message with the #dearmandy tag.

Connect on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Dan-B...

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/danbull

The Pirate Bay to be Sold

It has just been announced that world in/famous torrent tracker site, The Pirate Bay (TPB) is to be sold to Global Gaming Factory X AB, the owner of Entropia. The community using the site does not seem to be too happy about it if we are to judge by the comments on TPB blog:

"Way to sell out for the money :D
Where is your ideals gone now friends?
Ha, I cannot believe I supported you guys.
Same old same old. Where will it end?" driver779

"I'd say this is the death of PirateBay, they wanna make PirateBay a legit place if I understand the news being spread around.
Thats is done by removing all the illegal files (90%+ of the torrents?)
And this will make most people go away too." Mith0s

I have heard the sum of 60 million Swedish Crowns (30 in cash and 30 in stocks) being accepted for the sale of the site. TPB 'heads' are speaking abut a transfer and new impetus in the operation. I am not sure about this and I tend to agree with many of the comments on the blog site. However, TPB was always a limited thing and the end was in some way inevitable. I am disappointed that it was the private sector which stepped up and took over the machinery of TPB. It should have been made a research object for the people of Sweden to be used to develop new web applications and architetcures.

The collected resources of TPB (those that survived the legal onslaught of the past three years) is now passing into the hands of entrepreneurs. The business community perhaps has a better idea of the worth of such network ventures that TPB represents. The law however restricts what can be done with such a developed network structure. I have seen this recently in my experimentation with Spotify, another Swedish innovation that attempts to deliver unlimited streamed music over the net. While Spotify does deliver music, its network possibilities are extreamly limited. One cannot share play lists within the program (email of links is the only option), link to other users, watch other users for tips and so on. In effect one is alone on Spotify. TPB is/was a community and that was its strength and greatest weakness in the eyes of the law. By allowing for a horizontal spread of network connections users were/are able to share things. How this can be adopted to a legitimate business model by something like Global Gaming Factory X AB will be interesting to see.

Pirate Party Elected to EU Parliament

Christian Engström (left) and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge as activists. Christian is now on his way to a seat in the European Parliament

The winning of a seat in the European Parliament by Christian Engström from the Swedish Pirate Party (PP) should be considered an important turn in the ongoing (and far from over) developments around the law and the conceptualization of intellectual property.

Only a dismal 44% of Swedes actually bothered to vote in the 2009 EU elections (compared to around 89% that voted in the last national election in 2007) and the PP received 7.1% of the vote. The primary base for the PP vote is apparently younger people (under 30) and males. The commentators attributed this demographic to the PP preventing an extreme right wing party gaining a Swedish seat in the EU parliament.

While the figure are flying in the Swedish media tonight about how many and who brought this new political party into a representative institution, the broader ramifications are yet to be discussed on television or in the press. On the state broadcast news tonight Rickard Falkvinge was questioned about policies on tax, abortion, employment and health care. The PP does not have policies on these issues in a sense that they are dealt with separably from policies on the development of an information based society. I find this extreamly important as a development in the media ecology of the region.

If I were to go into describing the revolution we are living in when it comes to media I would be stuck at this keyboard for a longer time that I can afford, but consider this example that I gleaned from my Twitter feed just now:

"There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn." Edge

At the moment many universities are struggling to keep up with changes in media and information creation, storage and distribution. One of the major epistemological tenets of the struggle to come to terms with what is happening is the concept of 'real life' and the virtual, online, cyberspace or 'whatever it is that people are doing with digital media' (even finding names for some of these practices and realisations is difficult and confusing).

My impression is that the virtual/real discrepancy is prevalent in university leadership throughout much of Europe. The major parties in the Swedish EU elections expressed a 'real life' and 'virtual life' dichotomy when describing such issues as Peer to Peer file sharing prior to the EU election day last weekend. In the recent Pirate Bay trial here in Sweden the now mythic phrase "We don't use IRL. Everything is real life. We use AFK." (IRL- In Real Life, AFK- Away From Keyboard) was uttered in the courtroom by one of the defendants. The concept of AFK summarises many of the problems that have brought a representative of the PP to a seat in the EU parliament. These problems should be considered in light of Sweden being a land that has a very advanced level of digital media connectivity. Fast broadband is standard in Sweden. I believe that the situation in Sweden represents a future scenario for many presently less connected societies.

The narrowness of confining multimedia representation and embodiment to a 'virtual' sphere is fast running out of currency. The list of examples I could summon on the reality of what is happening just in online, so-called 'virtual worlds' is long. The Swedish tax authorities are struggling to find a solution for taxing the income of those who work with such communities as Second Life. How does one organise a working day according to union regulations when one works in a 24 hour world mediated by super-fast high resolution three dimensional internet worlds. Last term I tried to convince students (yes, young people who are supposed to be 'digital natives') that they can work according to the time it is in Second Life. Weekends could be used for socialising inworld rather than in the local pub. They did not like the idea. But this is something many of us are dealing with already. I read that our local hospital here has sent two doctors to live and work in Australia. Their jobs are to review x-rays that are done by Umeå Univesity Hospital in the north of Sweden during the day and are then sent to them in Sydney, where there is a 8 to 9 hour time difference. While the patient sleeps through the night here, the doctors in Australia examine the x-rays, sending a report by morning. The savings from not having to pay a night rate to two doctors makes the project worth while. These are just a few examples of the digital society we are seeing developing around us now.

Mr. Engström alone in Brussels will probably not be able to accomplish much. The desired goal of the PP of

"All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created." Pirate Party

Involves the dissolution of several international treaties to which Sweden and the rest of Europe are party to. Furthermore I am uncertain of the logic involved in the idea that all "culture and knowledge are good things". I think it does seem idealistic and somewhat naive. But is is also brave, and the sentiment behind the idea is to be admired. I think that what we see in the election of Mr Engström to the EU assembly is an important turn. This turn is away from the court rooms and the police raids that have filled the pages of our dying newspapers over the past few years, to the activities in the legislative bodies of the democratic state. I think there will be more stories in the coming year or two about how those that oppose the attempted preservation of the hierarchical media model as it has been for the past hundred years are seeking direct political representation.

European Union Elections and the Fear

"We build the knowledge society" - Election poster from the Swedish Pirate Party, Umeå May 2009.

On June 7th those adults living in the European Union who have not submitted a postal vote already go to the ballot boxes for an election of members to the EU parliament. Sweden is of course taking part in this process and I tell you things could not be more interesting if you are a researcher in digital culture and textuality.

Since January the membership of The Pirate Party in Sweden has risen from 14000 to 55000. If current polls are reflecting how people will vote they are now a serious contender for seats in the EU parliament. The problem for the PP in the 2007 Swedish general election was few of its supporters actually voted. This may change on June 7th but it is not for certain. In a recent poll, the Pirate Party Showed 5.1% of the vote. The second largest party for Sweden in the 18-29 age group and the fourth largest for the 30-44 group.

All this attention has not gone unnoticed by the larger parties. The Vanster (Left) party are the only one of the other serious contenders for EU seats which is adopting a position even sympathetic to that held by the PP. The center left Social Democratic Party is against the digital surveillance and copyright laws passed recently by the government in principle, but have failed to take a strong stand by providing any sort of dramatic alternatives. The Green Party of Sweden (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) are somewhat silent on the issue of file sharing, and their coalition with the Social Democrates probably has something to do with it.

The center-right coalition which forms the government in Sweden is not silent on the issue of either surveillance or P2P file sharing. This afternoon I listened to Hans Wallmark, a Moderate Party candidate for the EU parliament speak about

"Where is the limit for freedom on the internet? Shall we accept child pornography and drug trafficking on the internet? I believe freedom has its limits on the internet. Just as one warns of integrity but one must also give answers to the questions. Drugs on the net? Child pornography on the net? What is permitted?"

Serious questions but it all sounds very familiar to one who follows the news on the other side of the globe, and the net filter that is currently being debated, often irrationally, in Australia:

"There is no political content banned in the existing Broadcasting Services Act," he said.

"We are not building the Great Wall of China. We are going after the filth - like child pornography. Its been done around the world and it can be done here."

How it is done "will be guided by the outcome of the trials."

Most of the assertions otherwise are "patently a scare campaign [against] a policy objective we think is fair and reasonable," he said.
Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy

Fear is the key to this, as Senator Conroy points out. Fear is also being peddled in Sweden. Fear of lawlessness and the idea that in order to be safe media must be controlled and those who use it monitored. If we go further back we can easily find connections between media, fear and politics:

"Something that stood even deeper than the fear of Protestantism was also at stake in the great refusal of 1496. The decision to stand by the Vulgate, to veil the gospels, and stress lay obedience over lay education was certainly framed as a reaction to the Protestant threat. Fear of the threat of the spread of Lutheran heresy undoubtedly loomed large in the debates. Actions taken by Catholic churchmen, however, were designed to counteract forces which had begun to subvert the medieval church before Luther was born and which continued to menace the Roman Catholicism long after Protestant zeal had ebbed.
It was printing, not Protestantism, which outmoded the medieval Vulgate and introduced a new drive to tap mass markets."
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change By Elizabeth L. Eisenstein p353

The account of the printing press and the revolution it brought about, while often verging on a tale of technodeterminism, is undoubtedly worth considering when listening today to the members of the Pirate, Left, Moderate, Green, Social Dems and so forth on internet controls. Those with an insight into the long term effects of what we, in the economically developed parts of the world, are experiencing in media ecology should not resort to fear in order to express themselves.
And don't forget to vote.

Swedish Internet Service Providers Destroy IP Logs

The so-called 'intellectual property' environment in Sweden makes this a fascinating country to live in. Today the Stockholm based paper Dagens Nyheter published three more letters to the editor in regards to peer to peer file sharing. The lead letter has the heading "The Recording Industry is Dead. The Music Industry Lives!"

In the same edition, and across radio, television and internet (English) the big news today in Sweden is that an increasing number of major internet service providers are destroying the information on customers IP information. Today it was Tele2 that said it would not be keeping customer IP information more than the obligatory (by European Law) three weeks. This is in reaction to the extreme interpretation of the IPRED law which the Swedish government introduced on April 1, which states that if a rights holder of a music or film work can show there is a suspicion that an IP address is sharing copyright material, the records of traffic for the IP address can be obtained with a court order from the IP service provider. The loophole in the IPRED law is that the legislators forgot to add a clause that compelled the IP service provider to keep the IP address information. The focus of the IPRED law it seems was getting the information.

So today one of the main figures in the so-called anti-pirate forces, Henrik Pontén makes the bizarre statement regarding the destruction of IP records:

This question is much bigger than file sharing. Think of a pedophile alarm for example - how could the internet carriers protect a victim of the crime with this situation? This reaction means that all legislation regarding the internet is compromised. Profit goes before the law.

It seems to me like a panic reaction; pedophiles, victims, anarchy and the dissolving of all legal society online. The final sentence regarding the sanctity of the law over profit seems ironic considering the claims of hundreds of millions made against The Pirate Bay (only 30 million crowns was awarded in damages) recently and the losses claimed to sales which seems to drive the whole legal process against file sharing. The IPRED law is only 27 days old. How did we survive March?

The turn among major (and minor) service providers is the latest in a week of disasters for the anti-pirate organisations inSweden with a retrial demanded and 45 submissions made to the The Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) or the Parliamentary Ombudsmen on the possible presence of bias in The Pirate Bay Trial.

It's only Tuesday. What will happen next?

The News from Sweden

The Pirate Bay trial judgement is going to be announced on Friday. There will be a live video press conference at 1pm (CET) on Friday no matter what the verdict is. A possible jail term is one outcome for the four individuals charged with assisting copyright infringement. The outcome of the trial against The Pirate Bay has little consequence for the Peer to Peer global community but it does have significant consequences for the media ecology of Sweden. For this reason I will be following the trial result on Friday. Whatever happens their will be an appeal on Friday to a higher court. So this could go on for a long time yet. The trial has polarised the file sharing community and any further legal action will probably continue this. One amazing development from the Pirate Bay Trial is the formation of the spectrial thread on Twitter which remains active and has brought thousands of file sharers into communication with each other.

Here are some observations on the situation in Sweden regarding the Pirate Bay and the IPRED Law and what will happen tomorrow in the Stockholm Local Court:



The second event of interest coming out of Sweden this week is the closing of applications for tertiary study in the whole of the country for the Fall Term 2009. Higher (and lower and middle) education is free in Sweden. No charge for university. Nothing! I think this is amazing. I took part in the No Fees! demonstrations in Australia in 1989 (my first direct political action as an adult) as we witnessed the death of free higher education in that country. Not only is higher education free in Sweden, anyone anywhere in the world can apply to study here. Also for free. All you need is a visa, the requirements for the course (language etc.) and enough money to live on.

The contrasts in Sweden interest me; the severity of the IPRED law against file sharing and the amazing progressive attitude when it comes to education. Both are concerned with the spread of information and knowledge. One, education, is seen as a basic human right, while the spread of what are largely immaterial commodities over the internet is a crime. I would argue that both are related through the desire of people to expand themselves, to learn and experience.

Pirate Bay Trial Nears

"Jag KRÄVER en sal för MINST 150 personer, varav iaf 20 är reserverade för familj och närstående till oss åtalade, 80-100 till pressen och övrigt till allmänheten." email from Fredrik Neij
(I demand a chamber for at least 150 people, where around 20 are reserved for family and friends of we the accused, 80-100 for the press and the general public")

What promises to be the most important legal case so far in regards to peer to peer file sharing in Sweden is set to run from the 16th February to the 4th March 2009 in Stockholm. Four young men; Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, are charged with "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" through the popular torrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. If convicted, the defendants face up to two years in prison and SEK 1.2 million in restitution (147,896.18 USD). The trial is going to be a strongly contested one. Many witnesses are promised by both sides. The Pirate Bay recently released an interactive map of the tracker activity on their servers:



The fact that there is relatively little overall activity in Sweden, with a small population, detracts somewhat from the severity of the crime claimed by the prosecution I would reason. However the relatively high percentage base of the population of Sweden that uses the torrent tracker is probably an embarrassment for the Swedish government.

Sweden - the home of the Pirate Bay - is responsible for little over 1% (250,000 peers) of the tracker connections. Since Sweden has a population of approximately 9 million people, this is actually quite an accomplishment. These statistics are of course just a snapshot. They are updated frequently and vary depending on the time of the day. Torrent Freak

When considering that 2.8 percent of the total population of Sweden uses the Pirate Bay tracker it is a fairly high rate of penetration when compared to the 33% of all Pirate Bay peers that come from China. Around 7 million users, but only 0.5% of the population of China. The Pirate Bay is actually a blocked site in China.

Of course there is going to be a lot of legal argument about this sort of thing and the charge is one of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" not how many other people where involved. But by this logic Google is equally guilty as it provides search facilities for countless numbers of torrents (well, actually 218,000,000 for the word 'torrent') and direct downloads. This is going to be a very interesting trial.

If you are in Stockholm from the 16th February why not head over to the Tingsrätt, Flemminggatan 14 as there seems there is going to be a carnival atmosphere outside. There is a plan to have the S23K-bus owned by the Pirate Bureau parked outside the court (it is not too late to donate) as an information center. There are sure to be other interested parties present.



More information on the trial from here (in Swedish).

Commons Licenced CD Number One Seller on Amazon

This throws a spanner in the works of so many arguments against P2P technology and Creative Commons licenses:

NIN Best Selling MP3 AlbumNIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

Creatice Commons Weblog

Those music artists that do use digital peer to peer networks to distribute their material can make money it seems. Radio Head, Einstürzende Neubauten and now NIN seem to be doing well out of it. It may be different for software producers and film makers, but I am not sure. I attended a workshop recently where several computer game designers and software manufacturers spoke most bitterly about Peer to Peer file sharing. I actually felt for them, seeing it from their side I can understand that new technologies are placing pressure on how their products are marketed and distributed. However, speaking to a software manufacturer during the workshop he said he was currently implementing a new distribution system over the internet, with upgrades and community services being a central part of it. I got the feeling the difficulties of the digital market place are more a product (excuse the weak pun) of resistance to innovation than the dark side of the technology or the people who use it.
Interesting times we live in.

The Tomorrow Story

If you can read Swedish and are interested in what youth between the ages of 15-24 are doing with mobile media, you should read the new report Unga Mobile Vanor (Young Mobile Friends) (PDF). The big news is that two of three youths have abandoned ipod type technology in favor of mobile phone platforms with multimedia. With these tools media is obtained by 'blutoothing', sharing files over mobile networks. This makes the efforts by the Swedish government to allow authorities and publishers access to IP addresses of file sharers all the more meaningless. There will be no IP addresses in the future, just offshore phone carriers and mobile networks. Of course this is where the FRA law comes in maybe.

Tomorrow Story is a Stockholm based media research company. They have a cool report on branding as well.

Its wrong, immoral and fun..here's how to do it.

Something I have noticed in regards to media reports on the evils of Peer to Peer file sharing technology is that every article is basically an instruction manual on how to do it. The latest one from Australia is a hoot:

The report opens with:

MISSING one episode of West Wing, thanks to constant schedule changes, was enough to set Mark and Kim down the road to online piracy.

In language reminiscent of the moral panic surrounding drug abuse, Mark and Kim, "suburban thirtysomethings with a young baby" are swept up in the technological ease of instant media gratification:

And they can just as easily download music and movies, although Mark and Kim generally restrict themselves to television shows. A cheap DivX-enabled DVD player lets them watch downloads on their television as easily as watching a movie, and at practically the same picture quality.

And now we are aware that a DivX DVD player (which sells at my local supermarked from about $60 US) is what I need to satisfy my need for American television drama. But that's not all. The article ends with a detailed description for setting up a P2P file sharing node:

To take advantage of file-sharing, users can start with an internet plan offering as little as 3GB per month at speeds of 512kbps, which retails from $25 per month according to Broadband Choice (bc.whirlpool.net.au). Australian consumer broadband plans offer download speeds up to 24Mbps per second, with some plans offering well over 100GB of data a month. But plans offering unlimited downloads sell for about $100 per month, while restricted to speeds of 1.5Mbps.

Resistance is futile!

Moral Panic and (New) Media

The press ombudsman for Sweden, Yrsa Stenius, sees no alternative than to legislate against the spread of restricted material via internet peer to peer sites.
It was reported today on the Swedish National Radio station P1 Medierna that both Stenius and the Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask believe it is necessary to introduce legislation into the Swedish parliament concerned with "begränsande etiska filter på internet" (restricting ethical filters on the internet).
This is following the torrent distribution of autopsy images of two small children that were brutally murdered in Arbåga, Sweden earlier this year. The torrent is hosted by The Pirate Bay, which currently hosts around 1.3 million torrents.
The distribution of the autopsy images by the Pirate Bay was described by both the Press Ombudsman and the Justice Minister as 'publishing'. The nationally owned commercial television station TV4 which broke the story also termed it 'publishing'. In each instance of the use of the word 'publishing' it is attributed to the Pirate Bay.
Behind the moral questions surrounding the incident there is a broader network of concerns related to digital media and how un/informed government officials are in regards to how it functions.
Someone obtained the pictures from the high profile Arbåga murder of the young victims, they created a torrent and allowed them to be downloaded from their computer. In many ways such an action is similar to what Wikileaks and The Smoking Gun sites do. Once information is in circulation, especially if it is in digital form, there is always the possibility it may move out into the public sphere.
With 1.3 million torrents it is very unlikely that the handful of people who are the administrators of The Pirate Bay know what they are distributing. While search functions can target obnoxious material, it is only a matter of labeling it as something else and unless it is viewed no one knows what the torrent delivers other than the person who is seeding it. In a sense there is no single group or individual/s running The Pirate Bay. Rather it is a network that repairs itself, maneuvers around blockages and even feeds itself (when one torrent dies another takes its place until the material it distributes is no longer in demand). Publishing is more linear between a source and a receiver. Who is legally responsible for the material that is indexed by the Pirate Bay? Well that's the problem. Nobody knows yet.
The reactions around the Arbåga torrent is fascinating. Often via non-digital media those that are believed to be responsible, the administrators of the Pirate Bay, are asked to explain themselves. In an opinion piece for the National Broadcaster Jonas Andersson claims that the Pirate Bay site is a "commercial actor" and an "influence on public opinion regarding copyright and freedom of information". The size of the users body of the Pirate Bay is so vast that it is "monolithic in P2P file sharing".
The emphasis of Andersson's language is consistently to return the debate to the terminology and understanding of old one-to-many commercial media. This is interesting when one considers his research area described on the Goldsmith College website:

My aim is to thus expand and problematise the alleged ideals and norms which are implicit in much of the current dichotomised discourse saturating the phenomenon [P2P file sharing], through critically relating the users’ reasoning to the material and technocultural context.

Anderson is right in regards to his focus on the materiality of the medium. His stereotypical descriptions found elsewhere in his work of 'hackers' is less sound. Finally the concept of "dichotomised discourse" gives the game away as far as his approach is concerned. The discouse is not dichotomised, it is dual because it is set up that way in the media which is simultaneously reporting it and constructed by it. There is no normative center other than that proposed by the center/s of power (something Andersson seems to refer to very infrequently- never in this paper). How can one outline a critical relationship between technology and culture based on discourse without mentioning power?
But back to the issue at hand. Both Justice Minister Ask and Ombudsman Stenius have spoken earlier on an ethical guide to blogging, that would function as a regulatory system. Ask has also said the Internet is a "fantastic invention" (OMG) but it can lead to crime, "degeneration" (Sw: avarter) and we therefore need a Net Police. Now with the posting of the Arbåga torrent it seems there will be more calls for a moral internet.
However, before the Swedish government sets up a net filtering system it should reflect on the experiences of Australia. Under the morally indignant Howard government a national scheme to protect children from the dangers of the Internet was set up in 2007, but in 2008:

The Australian government has officially declared their internet filtering program, which they started about a year ago as an attempt to protect kids from pornography, a complete failure. Only 144,000 copies of the software were downloaded or ordered on CD-ROM with only about 29,000 actually being used. On top of that, kids were able to hack them anyway.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the Australian government hadn’t spent 85 million dollars on this program (it is a central part of a larger initiative that cost, all in all, 189 million dollars); quite a nice amount to throw away for something that anyone who has a clue would have declared a failure right from the beginning.

Their failure can be Sweden's beginning. How very Web 3.0.

Solution Found for Copyright Infringement

The site Dear Rockers is paying back musicians "five bucks at a time". The solution to the reported "millions" that is being stolen by file sharing music downloading is simply write to the musicians you love and send them cash. Here is an example from a guilty Oasis fan:

Dear Noel,
Here goes. Confession time.

I pilfered the vinyl of Definitely Maybe from Salford HMV in 1994. I don’t even live round there - I’m a “soft southern twat” lol - but I needed to prove how hard I was to my mates so I got a saver return for the day and travelled “oop north” to commit the crime. I was going to hitch, but it was a bit blowy out that day, plus I’d heard there were dreadful roadworks around the M6 area.

Anyroad up (as you Mancs say !) I’m now a comfortably off Exec in the music promotions business and I’ve seen first hand what havoc such foolish actions as my youthful misdemeanour can wreak upon the welfare and profits of the often under rewarded artist, such as your goodself.

Soooo…*deep breath*…here’s recompense. Only minor, but it’s something, eh?

Enclosed, please find:
US$1.90
GBP£1.51
and one Indian Rupee (Liam can probably fob this off in the fag machine in his local boozer)

All this ought to add up to the fair and princely sum of US$5 if we’re going by the current exchange rate of 1.946871. You can do the maths yourself.
Actually, you probably can’t, can you?

Yours Empathetically,
Phil. M. Riot

If you have guilty feelings about an Mp3 file you selfishly pilfered from one of your favorite stars, then go to Dearrockers.com, show them some love and take a load off your conscious.

Australians Against Pirates

Australia's biggest musical acts are crying poor in a new documentary that seeks to discourage people from obtaining music illegally and change the public's perception that they live a high life of riches and glamour.

Ironically, the 10-minute documentary, which was developed by the music industry and will be distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, has been designed so it can easily be spread virally across the file sharing websites that also hold much of the pirated music the industry is seeking to eradicate.

Artists featured on the video include Silverchair, Powderfinger, the Veronicas, Operator Please, Jimmy Barnes, Evermore, Gyroscope, Frenzal Rhomb, Grinspoon, Phrase, Human Nature, Mahalia Barnes, Damien Leith, Anthony Callea, Weapon X, Ken Hell and the Dawn Collective.

"The internet has been a godsend and a nightmare for the music industry," Jimmy Barnes says

"Only 100,00 more downloads to go and we might put these miserable sods out of a job. They are all past their use by date. The public don't need music forced down their throats through record company budgets, if it sounds good people will pay for it, simple. Viva la revolution." Commented one user on the YouTube site for the video.

Customers can use their Pipes to Access Pirated Content

And there is the word from Australia, coming down "the pipes":

While it is rare to find an Australian ISP hosting an illegal download site today - most are hosted in countries with relaxed copyright laws such as Sweden - the music industry is now targeting internet providers simply because customers can use their pipes to access pirated content.

Music industry opens new front on piracy, Sydney Morning Herald.

Will Peer to Peer Networks Save the Internet?

I am preparing to teach a session on Web 2.0 cultures tomorrow. The image above comes from a 2007 study on connectivity between nodes on the internet:

Three distinct regions are apparent: an inner core of highly connected nodes, an outer periphery of isolated networks, and a mantle-like mass of peer-connected nodes. The bigger the node, the more connections it has. Those nodes that are closest to the center are connected to more well-connected nodes than are those on the periphery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Interesting. A review of the study in The Technology Review summarized the findings as; "Routing traffic through peer-to-peer networks could stave off Internet congestion, according to a new study." Very interesting. But now, in light of recent developments in Europe regarding the P2P situation (prosecuting the users of Torrent trackers, obtaining IP numbers and so on), such a study becomes much more relevant to not only how the internet functions, but how the interests of a relatively few people (some musicians and artists and most of those that sell their works) may affect how the internet is actually structured.
Just imagine if the nodes in the above image were centered around the organizations or people who had the rights to distribute intellectual property (publishing houses, recording companies, media empires, movies studios) and not those that had the knowledge, skill and desire/interest to do so (no matter what people are doing on the net, just the idea that the law dictates the technological stuctures). I would think that the nodes of the center would be larger, the overall structure would be more like a wheel with a narrow rim, and the "mantle-like mass of peer-connected nodes" would be thin and fragile (if not non-existent). The entire weight of information transfer networks would be focused on the center. This is a dangerous situation in many ways. Such old fashion concepts as democratic rights and freedom of expression are relevant, however what about the technical capabilities of the system to deal with a centralized arrangement? A project we ran in the northern Swedish Sami community of Jokkmokk in 2004 showed us that centralizing internet channels is a big mistake. The 20 000 mobile phone users that were in the tiny town of Jokkmokk (pop. 5000) for the annual winter market festival crashed the internet router that led to the town from the coast. The entire of southern Lapland (a very big geographic space) was without mobile phones, internet, ATM or electronic cash for 3 days.

What is Stealing?

The situation for peer to peer file sharing in Sweden (apparently its quite popular here) is about to get more interesting. Firstly the application for summons is going to be delivered by prosecutor Håkan Roswall to the public prosecutors office this week after a 20 month investigation into the organisation. It will probably result in some sort of legal action against the Pirate Bay (currently hosting 1 million torrents and 10 million seeders) but spokespeople for the Bay have already said they are prepared to take it all the way to the European Court so it will be years before any binding decision is made. Even Håkan Roswall does not believe the Pirate Bay can be stopped with a case mounted in Sweden and according to the driving force behind the case against the Bay, IFPI "Internationally there are 20 illegal downloads of music for every legal one". The situation seems difficult for the anti-pirates, however that does not stop them.
Liza Marklund (who ironically runs a publishing company called Piratforlaget - The Pirate Publishing House) published a column in the Expressen newspaper ("Stop Complaining Net Pirates"), which was a hard attack against not only the act of illegal downloading, but the ideology of those who propose that the laws surrounding publishing rights need to be changed. The final sentence in Marklunds diatribe attempts to summarise those in the Pirate Party (which actually is a very separate organization from the Pirate Bay and the Pirate Bureau):

Vi är ett gäng lata, snåla nättjuvar som snyltar på andras arbete.
("We are a gang of lazy, stingy net thieves who sponge on the work of others.")

Marklund must have been having a bad day when she wrote this as it seems to have little to do with the situation that is P2P sharing technology and law today. Wheather or not those that download share their own materials that they have themselves created (and I am sure many do) is not really the point. There are over 450 comments on the article which summarize a number of positions in relation to it (if you can read Swedish). However, I wanted to comment also on the article but the comments have been closed off now, so I thought to add something here. From Techcrunch:

The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing).

Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes). Note: See update below.

It isn’t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it’s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

I really do not think that Marklund and those she represents understand what is going on here. Calling people names is not going to solve the problems of new technology colliding with old industry. A legal result (and it is at least 5 years away if the Pirate Bay take the upcoming case to the European Court) may make some difference to the situation, but with access to the law dependent upon financial and political power it seems that the result will just contribute to the already bi-polar situation we have at the moment. Many people no longer see culture as property but rather experience has become the commodity they are prepared to pay for. A concert, festival, exhibition, reading will be well attended and make money. Distributing the products of an artist introduces the public to the work of the artist. They will pay to experience the work of the artist but not to have a track on an Mp3 player or some images from a film. Once people realize that the cultural ecomony we are now living in is not the same as that one that existed even 10 years ago then we can begin to set up a new system where artists are rewarded for their work. Holding out for a return to the past is only depriving artists of income and the support they need to make new works. Insisting on payment for every megabyte is dumb.

UPDATE: Tomorrow at 9:30 am the European Court of Justice will deliver a decision making it possible or not for Internet Service Providers to be obliged to provide police with ISP numbers of those who download large amounts of information over the internet. The details of the case are:

Reference for a preliminary ruling - Juzgado de lo Mercantil no 5, Madrid, Spain - Interpretation of Articles 15 (2) and 18 of Directive 2001/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (OJ 2000 L 178, p. 1), Article 8 (1) and (2) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (OJ 2001 L 167, p.10) and Article 8 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (OJ 2004 L 157, p. 45) - Treatment of data generated by communications made in the context of the supply of an information society service - Duty of operators of electronic communications networks and services, providers of telecommunications network access and providers of data storage services to retain and make available such data - Not where civil proceedings are concerned.
Advocate General : Kokott

Of course Sweden will have to comply with the ruling of the court. Professor of Media Technology at the Royal Technical College in Stockholm, Roger Wallis describes the rational behind ISP surviellance for P2P file sharing as:

Sverige är nästan längst fram i världen när det gäller små företag i mediebranschen som utvecklar nya affärsmodeller som går ihop med internet och fildelning. Det ses som ett jättehot från de stora skivbolagen som satsar allt mer pengar på allt färre artister, och de har inte råd med en flopp.

("Sweden is almost foremost in the world when it comes to small companies in the media industry which develops new business models that include internet and file sharing. That is seen as a huge threat by the big record labels which devote more and more money to fewer and fewer artists, and they cannot afford to produce a flop")

The maths of piracy

According to Sabiene Heindl, the General Manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations Pty Ltd (MIPI), "Australians illegally download about one billion songs every year." With a population of around 20 million people that is 50 songs each for every living child and adult in the country. Not impossible, but with broadband coverage reaching only 2,785,000 people (June 2006) in Australia its seems a fantastic figure. For the 2,785,000 people with broadband to have downloaded the 1 billion songs (that's one thousand million, 1 000 000 000 songs!!) each broadband subscriber would have to download 359.066427 songs in the year. Considering many of the broadband connections listed in the OECD figures would be companies and places of business then the figure for downloads per user would be higher. This seems a tenuous claim. But it may scare people into allowing ISPs to disconnect those that download files as the MIPI is trying to gain the rights to do from the Internet industry association. The first casualty of war is truth:

"The Australian music industry would prefer not to sue individuals who are engaged in illegal file sharing, That said, it may well be that at some stage in the future we will have no option but to take those measures. At this stage we think that this is a proposal that will be effective and provide an effective deterrent.":- Sabiene Heindl