The BitTorrent protocol is one of the most beautiful technologies of recent years. Not only because of what it can do – Free sharing of information among Internet users – but also because of it’s ingenious design from the computer science point fo view. It’s quickly become my favourite means of peer-to-peer filesharing.

The PirateBay has been my favourite BitTorrent tracker for a long time now. It’s always been a server with a soul for me. Each time I’m there to search for a torrent, I feel kinda welcome. Shockingly, recent trials have sentenced it’s creators for 1 year of jail and each of them has to pay over 650 000 euro. I feel that it is unacceptable that people behind this wonderful and admirable site are punished for creating it.

I don’t agree with several ideas of the (originally) Swedish Pirate Party’s principles regarding copyright law. I don’t like the idea of drastically shortened period of copyright protection and they do not have a clear definition of what is „non-commercial“ use of the content. Their principle document points out the crucial problems very well but doesn’t offer viable alternatives.

However, they are absolutely right when it comes to citizen’s right to privacy and to share information. I have few bits on my hard drive and if I and my friend Johnny want, he can have exactly the same bits and there ain’t no fucking way anyone’s gonna tell us he can’t, because he can. That is the wonder of this technological era. And consequently a real challenge to content makers.

It is intrinsic property of information that it is easy to copy and spread. With modern cryptography it is easy to conceal information which is not meant to be public and to create really secure communication channels. But once I decide to tell my stuff to the outside „untrusted“ world, there’s no way I can control it’s spread. That’s the catch and we have to live with it. Digital rights management and other oppresive tools try to piss against the wind and control the uncontrollable. Spreading the information existed for many years, even before invention of print. Once I heard something I could decide to tell it further, once I saw something I could describe or paint it so that others could see it. Technology only brings quality to the copies.

The people trying to make money by selling copies are sad, because this world isn’t fit for their business models that worked so well 50 years ago. Any new technology that facilitates free spread of information is another big strike to their profit stack. The guys from the Pirate Bay only created a new technology, which hurt these people really bad (imagine a giant media corp. CEO struck by a declining sales graph on a report that he reads on a leather sofa in his yacht) and now they got punished for their invention.

I am not a communist. I understand business (a bit). If I produce something I want to get paid. Possibly enormously well. I am a content maker myself. But do we really want to punish inventions ? Is that what copyright is about ?

My idea is to finally accept the fact that any „information product“ today is very easily copiable, once made public and not fight it. It’s a lost battle, so why not give up now and save ourselves lot of energy. Instead let’s start to work on new business models and technologies allowing rewarding the content makers and stop putting intelligent people in jail, because we need them in this process.