So I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, but as some of you have pointed out, my research skills have been somewhat less than “mad” recently, owing to a distinct lack of passion on my part. On that note, let me be the first to apologize for my spotty update schedule of late – I’ve been embroiled in some silliness recently that is on its way out the door as of now, so you can expect a return to the high standards of cynicism you’ve come to expect from old Uncle Alex.

Like most kids, I really dug the idea of pirates. Oh, not real pirates – those guys were downright scary. I mean, seriously – slave trading, rape and wanton butchery aren’t the sort of practices to which most seven year old children should aspire. No, it was the romanticized ideal of piracy that drew me – the brave pirate captain battling the oppressive Powers That Be on the high seas was an image comparable, in my mind, to the likes of Robin Hood. For those of you who remember the Muppets’ take on R. L. Stevenson’s immortal “Treasure Island”, pirate extraordinaire Long John Silver (played by the ever-awesome Tim Curry) sang his “one and only number” espousing the virtues of the pirate lifestyle:

“Now take Sir Francis Drake, the Spanish all despise him

But to the British he’s a hero and they idolize him

It’s how you look at buccaneers that makes them bad or good

And I see us as members of a noble brotherhood!”

Now obviously, this song was written with comedic intent (and to comedic effect if I remember the movie correctly) and it isn’t meant to glorify the kind of violence perpetrated by real-life pirates. I don’t think anybody is going to leap to the defense of Somali pirates who sail gleefully all over the place, hijacking everything from yachts to oil tankers and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I have to admit hijacking a ship the size of one of those monstrous oil tankers is kind of impressive, but I’m still not condoning the behaviour. Or am I?

I think piracy, at least the way it’s perceived in the public consciousness, can be compared reasonably to something like freedom-fighting. Like Tim said, it’s all about how you look at it. Our media tends to glorify people who fight the system, so to speak, especially if it’s for a cause enough people can get behind. You’re never going to hear anyone call Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”, because he was fighting for a cause a lot of people believe in, and therefore he’s a “freedom fighter”. On some level, people can accept violence when it’s couched in the rhetoric of a “greater good” because in a very pragmatic way, fighting to end apartheid justifies killing some folks, and therefore we perceive Nelson Mandela as essentially a good man who had to do some pretty terrible things in the name of his cause.

It’s a pithy analogy, but look at the way Hollywood portrayed Jack Sparrow – possibly the most famous pirate-that-never-was in history. If you take a step back and look at the character in its entirety, he’s kind of a terrible guy: he’s a violent drunkard who is willing to play both sides of any conflict in the interest of seeing the best possible outcome for himself. But the roguish spirit, charisma and sense of humour that come through so strongly in Johnny Depp’s portrayal somehow excuse his selfishness. It’s the whole “knave with a heart of gold” trope we all love so much – characters who seem to exist only for self-gratification, but who step up and do “what’s right” when it counts. I’ll buy that coming from anti-heroes of the Han Solo school, but not from Sparrow, because you get the overriding sense that he would have done what was best for him either way, and just because it so happened the outcome was beneficial to the other heroes of the story, doesn’t mean the “greater good” was his motivation. And yet, the character has become one of the more enduring in recent history, because people believe what they want to believe and see what they want to see.

But of course I’m not dedicating an entire article to my philosophical take on piracy for no reason. No, like I said at the beginning, I’ve been wanting to write about this issue for a while, but I’m only getting around to it now. I’m referring to The Pirate Bay, possibly the most well-known and controversial BitTorrent site on the internet.

And it’s not because of the obvious nomenclature that I bring up the subject of pirates. A lot has been made over the last fifteen or so years of the so-called internet piracy phenomenon, and as an artist with a personal stake in how copyright laws work, I have something to say about the saga of The Pirate Bay specifically.

For those of us who have spent the last decade and a half living on a deserted island, subsisting on coconuts and monkey flesh, the story of The Pirate Bay (or TPB) is rooted in the practice of file-sharing. The term itself refers to the transmission of digitally-stored information through several channels: removable media like USB keys, internet-based hyperlinked documents, and peer-to-peer networking programs are among the most common. The legal ramifications of file sharing gained prevalence in the mid-90s as a result of the infamous Metallica versus Napster debacle, which culminated in the termination of many websites catering to P2P networking thanks to the efforts of organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA. As we near the end of this century’s first decade, however, the popularity of file sharing as a means to circumvent what many people see as unfair costs levied upon media fans (the most obvious being film, television and music) has not decreased.

In the interest of being as specific and correct as I can be with regards to this issue, I’ve been doing some reading on Canadian copyright law. Now, I’m no lawyer (though one of my longtime friends and correspondents, Adam Grant of Two Assholes Talking About Nerd Stuff, actually is a practicing lawyer – you can find some of his thoughts on recent copyright controversy here) so I’m not suited to slog through page after page of legal rhetoric in an attempt to make a point, but I’m going to try anyway. According to the Canadian Copyright Act as it relates (for the purpose of this example) to audio recordings:

Copying for Private Use

Where no infringement of copyright.

(1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part ofa) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied

onto a recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

Limitation

Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in subsection (1) is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.

See what I mean about legal jargon? Good lord, it’s small wonder entire educational institutions are designed from the ground up to teach people how to communicate in this fashion. It’s like reading Greek by way of Pig Latin after running it through BabelFish four or five times.

The bottom line is this: it’s not illegal to download an artist’s entire catalogue of music, nor is it illegal to have it on your hard drive. What is illegal is distributing it. So it’s sort of like cigarette sales: it’s not illegal for a minor to smoke, but every way they could conceivably get their hands on cigarettes (through sale, gift or otherwise) is illegal, so that makes somebody accountable somewhere along the line.

In this case, at least in Canada, that makes The Pirate Bay accountable (this is a pirate story, remember?). But let’s take a little look at TPB before we set them up to be drawn and quartered, shall we?

TPB was established in 2003 by a Swedish anti-copyright organization called Piratbyrån or “The Piracy Bureau” with the site officially becoming an idependent entity a year later. TPB quickly gained popularity among the file-sharing crowd, rising to an Alexa rating of 105 (yes, that means it’s the 105th most popular website on the whole internet). Controversy first struck in 2006 when TPB’s offices were raided by Swedish authorities, resulting in the loss of a great deal of server equipment – but remarkably, the site was back up and running inside three days. Even more shockingly, the public backlash against the Swedish government and in favour of TPB resulted in a huge rise in popularity for Sweden’s state-registered “Pirate Party” – by 2007, membership in the party had risen to the point of being on par with the Swedish Green Party.

The site has remained up and running since, despite constant legal attacks on the site and its proprietary <!– @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } A:link { so-language: zxx } –>

owners Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström. These four were charged in April of this year with “assistance to copyright infringement” and sentenced to one year in prison and individual fines of about $3.6 million USD. They immediately appealed the charges.

Unable to strike directly at the site’s owners due to some savvy legal dodging, the enemies of TPB struck at the source, threatening the ISP itself with huge fines if they continued to host the site. Initially, the move worked and the site went down, but in short order it was back again on another ISP. When that provider backed out due to similar pressure, they moved again. And again.

At the end of October, the Stockholm District Court forbade Svartholm and Neij from operating the site. So they sold TPB to a private interest and moved out of Sweden, disabling their Swedish tracker as they went, which effectively nullified the court’s threat. According to an article on TorrentFreak,

“[B]ecause [TPB] no longer operates a tracker of its own it is much less responsible for the infringements of others than it was before. This potentially paves the way for the ban on the site to be lifted. Furthermore, while the founders are banned from running the site in Sweden, they say they no longer run it. But in any event, neither of them live in Sweden. In the meantime, the site remains up.”

So the long and the short of it is TPB has managed to duck and weave around every conceivable legal action taken against them, and while I’m sure the site will eventually go under (either due to some kind of unified stand against them, or else being outpaced by another, more advanced torrent site) for now they seem to be staying one step ahead of the authorities.

They aren’t kidding when they call themselves pirates, are they?

But here’s the rub for me. I find my little boy, pirate-worshipping self fundamentally at odds with my current, internet-savvy musician self, and I’ll be honest when I say I don’t know who’s winning that internal war.

You see, I was raised in the music industry. My father is a musician and I was brought up around him and his friends and compatriots on and off the stage, so my take on music as an occupation is somewhat different (read, more jaded) than that of my contemporaries. More than anything else, I got into music because I love to do it – I love to write, I love to play guitar, and I really, really love being onstage. But I’ve never harboured any delusions that I’d make any money at it. My father always told me that real musicians have day jobs, and from what I’ve seen growing up, he couldn’t be more right. I’ve been privy to some pretty amazing talent in my life – I’ve seen musicians you’ve never heard of (and you never will) quite literally wipe the stage with other acts, and guess what? Ninety percent of them don’t make their primary income from playing. They work in all sorts of fields, and music – while I hate to trivialize the love of it by using this word – is pretty much relegated to the status of “hobby” out of necessity – you have to have a roof over your head and food in your stomach if you’re going to go out and play, and if you can’t make enough cash to facilitate those basic needs with nothing but your guitar and your guts, you have to bite the bullet and go do some lifeless, soul-sucking “job” if you want to keep it up.

If you’re lucky, you might make just enough to keep touring and getting your music out there, and for those hard-working bands who are just trying to make it to their next gig, yeah – I feel it if they’re pissed that someone is downloading their content from somewhere like TPB and they’re getting cut out of the fiscal loop. That’s why I try to make a point of purchasing independent or small-label music if I like it, put it on my computer and show it to friends and associates in the interest of promoting music I think is great. I don’t give it away; I expose it in the hope that other people I know will also like and buy it.

There’s also the question of P2P sharing as a vehicle for proliferation. I regularly give my music to friends and family in recorded format, and I have no problem with them giving it to other people, as long as it’s material I’ve already made headway into securing. I personally work with the Song Vault maintained by the Songwriter’s Association of Canada, which is exactly what it sounds like: I record music and send it to them, and if somewhere down the line someone tries to pass off my stuff or an obvious derivative as their own, I call up SAC and they pull my copy out of the Vault as evidence for a court case. That’s my biggest problem with P2P sharing: not that people have free access to my music, but that they could steal it in an intellectual sense.

And realistically, that’s not going to be an issue for the big-name bands that seem to have such a problem with P2P. Nobody’s going to believe for a second that I wrote and recorded a song that sounded remarkably like “Enter Sandman”. Their problem isn’t intellectual theft – it’s just that they want to get paid for their intellectual property, and on some level I understand that. But it’s still difficult to swallow for me when a band already making millions on ticket sales and merchandise and whatever has a psychotic break about me having not paid for my copy of their platinum record. Do they really need my money that much, or is it a question of principle?

I love the internet and that’s a fact. I love the ability it grants me to check out bands I might like so I can go to their show later and tell other people about it. I’ve said before the internet is the most democratic invention in history, precisely because it doesn’t put restrictions on what you can and can’t access. And yeah, that’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box issue because I could conceivably be accessing all sorts of terrible stuff – child porn comes to mind. But fundamentally, you have to consider the fact that almost everyone who uses the internet has downloaded something illegally in the past. There’s obviously a demand for it. So does that make TPB the pirates for providing access, or does it make us the criminals for wanting something for free?

I personally think it’s a little of both. Like I said before, it’s difficult for me to swallow when I hear about musicians or movie makers who complain about the loss on their paycheque thanks to file sharing, because it’s comparatively rare to hear these complaints coming from the indy circuit – it’s almost always some overpaid hack of a musician or the guys who make movies like Twilight that end up getting the publicity when they come out to bitch. Contrarily, most of the people I know in the indy circuit already give away their music in the hopes of getting some attention. But that doesn’t mean artists shouldn’t have a say, and at the end of the day, no matter what I think, uploading content that isn’t yours to be downloaded for free is still illegal – there’s no getting around that.

But I think on some level we need entities like The Pirate Bay. The internet is still a relatively new tool (relative to, say, the printed word) and as a culture we’re still feeling out what is going to be okay and what isn’t. If TPB had folded immediately back in 2006, the controversy wouldn’t be generated and I wouldn’t be writing about this today. In fact, there’s a good possibility that if controversy wasn’t driven by those who don’t share the opinions of the censors, I might very well not be writing this blog at all, unless it was to sell meaningless products or espouse political viewpoints fed to me by my handler.

Maybe that’s where the romanticism of pirates has always come from. It’s easy to forget the fact that they’re essentially criminals when everything about their presentation makes us think of them as free-spirited bandits who fight the faceless Man to ensure we keep getting to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm without having to buy an overpriced DVD set. And the way the current Canadian law is set up, they’ll take the fall for us if someone shuts them down. No wonder we think they’re great guys.

But I’d like your thoughts on this issue. Do you think TPB is ahead of the curve when it comes to the future of how we’ll use the internet, or are they just bottom-feeding Bluebeards with a penchant for coding?

Hit me up in the comment section. Every thought-out comment gets a response.