Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. He has been named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, and shortlisted as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. He has been named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, and shortlisted as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.

Ten years on, The Pirate Bay has made it clear that no laws in the world can shut down a service wanted by hundreds of millions of people. It will keep decentralizing to protect itself from legal assaults, says Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge.

The phenomenon of sharing culture and knowledge seems to swing in cycles between centralized and decentralized. The Pirate Bay appeared with little fanfare in the fall of 2003. At the time, BitTorrent was not the preferred sharing technology at all, and a Swedish think-tank named The Pirate Bureau wanted to try out the technology, as it showed promise by being decentralized.

While we would think that sharing activity would need to be decentralized by its nature, it turns out that this is rarely the case. When we were sharing culture and knowledge in our teens and before, that happened on cassette tapes. The cassette players of the day would even come with slots for two cassettes and a "copy A to B" button, having dedicated features to make it easy to share culture and knowledge between people.

As computers arrived, they too used the cassette tape early on to store culture, knowledge, and programs, so sharing carried over into this new world very easily.

Around the 1990s, phone-line modems became popular, and a proto-Internet of proto-websites - BBSes, bulletin board systems - flared up. Instead of connecting to the net and then being online with everybody at the same time, you would connect your computer to one BBS at a time over the phone line, and these BBSes would share files between them and make them available to their users.

Still, this was more convenient than going over to a friend's and copying a cassette tape, so sharing culture and knowledge over BBSes quickly caught on. There would be centralized repositories from where you could download whatever was hot that day - mostly text files, games, and the occasional blocky, low-resolution pornography. (A BBS with half a gigabyte of hard drive space was enormous at the time.)

Centralized vs. decentralized

Fast forward to the deployment of the Internet in general, and Napster in particular. Where BBSes had held the entire catalog of stuff on their hard drives, the genius of Napster was to connect users' hard drives to each other, rather than attempting to gather everything centrally.

The bet of Napster was that the record industry would see the profit opportunities, and make Napster part of the industry. The alternative would be to force sharing underground, fostering decentralization.

As Cory Doctorow says: "copying always becomes easier - at no time in the future will it be harder to share than it is right now".

Napster was also a marvel in ease of use. Type the name of a song, listen to it almost instantly. You couldn't beat that. For all the talk of peer-to-peer and technical architecture explaining Napster's success, it was the simplicity of use that was its killer feature, not its underlying technical theory.

Now, as we know, the record industry chose madness over reason (and continues to do so), killing Napster.

In its wake, a somewhat decentralized protocol named DirectConnect appeared, one that made it possible for everybody to run their own Napster-like service. But the transfers were still quite inefficient - you had to find one specific person who had what you wanted, and then manufacture your own copy of the shared culture or knowledge from blueprints provided by that one person.

Pirate Bay era: Fighting censorship

The BitTorrent technology, largely made popular by The Pirate Bay, improved on this in two aspects.

First, everybody would transfer to everybody. If you were looking for blueprints to manufacture your own copy of Game of Thrones, and 10,000 people were sharing those blueprints, you would get them from not one person, but get different pieces from thousands at once. It was vastly more efficient.

The second improvement was notable as it was not technical but legal. Where people had been indicted in the Napster and DirectConnect era for sharing thousands of blueprints to culture and knowledge, allowing others to manufacture their own copies using their own property, it was not possible to see what other blueprints somebody was sharing just because you were receiving parts of one specific item. This added a significant protection against prosecution for breaking the copyright monopoly.

But the real breakthrough of The Pirate Bay lay not in its technology, but in its defense of civil rights. When they were bullied by the copyright industry's lawyers, the operators of The Pirate Bay actually talked back - and people loved them for it. They didn't waste time being polite, either. "Fuck off" would be a very nice reply to a legal empty threat. Once they posted all the threats and their replies online, they were instant heroes in a generation of sharing.

What's puzzling is that these copyright industry lawyers keep insisting that the exclusive rights - the monopolies - are "property", when it's clearly not so in law. You'd think the lawyers wouldn't lie about what the law actually says. Yet, they insist on doing so, for mere PR purposes - trying to portray the monopoly as property, when in reality, it's a monopoly that limits property rights.

The copyright industry wasted no time in pushing for censorship of The Pirate Bay, using every justification from child pornography (yes, they have consistently tried to associate the free sharing of culture and knowledge with raping children...) to global-level trade embargos.

In some countries, the copyright industry succeeded on paper in introducing such censorship, but censorship circumvention tools would appear almost instantly. Thus, The Pirate Bay bills itself as the world's most resilient BitTorrent site – a hard-earned reputation it has every right to. It has fought censorship pretty much worldwide, doing the world a favor in teaching the general population how to evade governmental censorship.

It is clear and notable that The Pirate Bay does not evolve much. Technically, it pretty much remains the same site it was around 2006, which must be said to be unique among the world's top-100 sites.

That fact also says a lot about the ongoing demand for the services provided. The conviction of the first operators of The Pirate Bay in 2009 predictably didn't change a thing with regards to the site itself. While the trial as such was a mail-order US-ordered mockery of justice that the future will look down very harshly on, it didn't make a dent in sharing.

No law can shut it down

As of 2013, there are maps of where people share culture and knowledge the most in violation of the copyright monopoly. The United States is consistently below average on these charts, but that's nothing to brag about at all: when you compare the sharing chart to a household-bandwidth chart, you find that they are very strongly correlated.

Thus, the fact that people in the United States share less than their peers in Europe or Asia has at all nothing to do with respect for the market-distorting copyright monopolies: the real cause of less sharing is the severely underdeveloped and lagging Internet infrastructure in the United States.

This article started with an observation of the centralized versus the decentralized. It could just as well have been an observation between the lawyer community and the technical entrepreneur community. Where the lawyers attack technology, the latter responds by decentralizing and therefore becoming resilient to legal attacks.

A decade with The Pirate Bay has made four things crystal clear when predicting the future.

One, The Pirate Bay has shown that no laws in the world can shut down a service that is wanted by hundreds of millions of people; two, governmental censorship is as universally hated as it is easily circumvented; three, services keep decentralizing to protect themselves from legal assault; and four, the sharing of culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopoly keeps growing by the day from an already-sky-high level.

I think there are very important lessons to learn from these four observations. If only politicians were willing to learn half of them, we'd all be much better off.



Rick Falkvinge for RT

Rickard "Rick" Falkvinge is a Swedish IT entrepreneur known as the founder and first party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.

