Rasmus Fleischer's talk at this year's Reboot conference in Denmark (which, sadly, I had to miss) was on behalf of Piratbyran, the Swedish "Pirate Bureau" that arose from the embattled Pirate Bay torrent-tracking site. It's a provocative attack on copyright itself, and on the way that adhering to 18th-century printing press regulations makes problems in a 21st-century computer world:
We emphasize and affirm the tendency that it is getting harder to distinguish between local transfers of data and "file sharing" between different systems, for example in wireless environments. Digital technology is built on copying bits, and internet is built on file-sharing.
Copying is always already there. The only thing copyright can do is to impose a moral differentiation between so-called normal workings and immoral.
For the copyright industry, it is of extreme importance to keep people uninformed of the real workings of networked computers. They want to make an artificial distinction between "downloading" and "streaming", as equivalents to record distribution and radio broadcasting.
But – and we should keep insisting that – the only difference between "streaming" and "downloading" lies in the software configuration on the receiving end. However, copyright law will never be able to acknowledge that. It has to rely on fictions, on a kind of cognitive mapping, where notions valid for traditional one-way mass media are forcefully applied to the internet. We call it Mental Rights Management (and it is the very precondition for DRM).
(Thanks, Jack!)
Update: Here's a podcast of an interview with one of the Pirate Bay guys, conducted by Chaos Computer Club radio (Thanks, Swen!)
