The other day I chronicled the strange journey of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that is notorious for finding less-than-legal software, movies, TV shows, music…you name it. Sure, it’s wrong to steal content, no matter how you justify it -- people deserve to be paid for their work. After all, I don’t work for free, I fully expect to be compensated for my efforts. I have a wife and kids to provide for. I would guess you also do not labor for free.

However, that piece about the many domains the service has recently occupied, combined with something my colleague Mark Wilson brought up about the ridiculous porn filtering in the UK, got me thinking.

Governments around the world have tried, with moderate success, to crack down on the internet, treating it as something that could be controlled, even utilized, by them. We’ve seen it from the Great Firewall of China. We witnessed it during the Arab Spring, when uprisings spread through social networking and dictators attempted to suppress that access.

All of that is real. It hits home. We all watched in horror the videos and images emerging from such far-flung locations as Syria, Iran, Libya and Egypt. Honestly, who could not be moved by the plight of these average citizens and their efforts to overthrow the oppressor and bring an amount of freedom and dignity to their nation?

This is all, quite obviously, much beyond the scope of simple, mundane things such as piracy and protecting children from seeing a breast, despite that the image pertains to cancer. The very things the US and UK attempt to handle with secret court orders and filters seem ludicrous by comparison to the trials of other, less fortunate, world citizens.

Nothing experienced in other parts of the world can even be compared to complaining that your porn site isn’t accessible, or that you aren’t able to locate a copy of The Hobbit. If those are your biggest concerns, then you should consider yourself lucky.

But in a strange sort of way, that’s exactly where The Pirate Bay comes in. It epitomizes the very resiliency of the human spirit that most of us have only seen on the news. I may not use it, but I’m certainly glad it’s still there. Still standing tall despite every effort to thwart it. It provides a modicum of hope for the internet. It's not about the RIAA or MPAA or even the NSA -- it's about the freedom to access what you want and when you want it. The Pirate Bay symbolizes much more than its founders ever intended.

Domain seizures, continuous moves, law suits and jail time. Virtually everything short of a bomb has been thrown at these guys and yet, they endure. We can’t exactly compare that endurance to citizens in recently war-torn nations, but for the rest of us, it still sends a beacon that maybe, just possibly, Big Brother hasn’t quite won the battle yet. Sail on mighty ship.

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