[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by JackSpratts

additional sources
also, from the reboot conference in copenhagen chaos radio has an in depth interview with peter from the pirate bay (43 min mp3). dig those cool accents. makes me want to head on over. would i love to be there right now. i can amost smell the coffee.
- js.

Piratebyrån's Rasmus Fleischer's speech at the Reboot Conference is available here:

Piratbyran's speech at Reboot

It's one of the most insightful commentaries I have seen on the copyrights issues in the era of filesharing, definitely worth a read!

A couple of samples:

Metadata, not copyrighted material, is the war on piracy's target

...

Pirated copies will be produced, no matter the fate of file-sharing networks. We're all too often today equalising unauthorised digital copying with file-sharing networks, but it's a fact that a lot of the illicit warez arrives at the hard disk from a physical storage medium, like an usb-device, a borrowed cd or a burned dvd.

To the extent that some people may avoid P2P networks, research shows that they just reconnect to other sources of data – be it physical copying from family and friends or files exchanges with mail and chat clients. It's all a piracy performed in a grey zone outside surveillance.

So the question is not piracy or not, nor if darknets are desirable or not, but what infrastructures piracy will take use of. Burning cd's or gmailing files or giving them away with services like Yousendit.com, means quite much that piracy is stuck in the same infrastructure that it had during the era of the cassette tape and the photocopier, only multiplied by digital effectivity. There is still a dependence of finding someone (a friend, a library) with access to the source. File-sharing networks, however, connects every private archive that in one particular moment is connected, into the largest and most accessible archive ever.

About mental rights management

...

It is essential for the copyright industry to keep the majority of computer users trapped in the belief that the ”window” of their web browser is exactly a window, through which they can look at information located elsewhere, under someone else’s control. Then our job is to clarify that everything you see on your screen or hear through your speakers, is already under your control.
Zeros and ones have no taste, smell or color – be they parts of pirated material or not. Therefore it is impossible to construct a computer that cannot reproduce and manipulate these zeros and ones – as such a machine would no longer be a computer, but something as grotesque as a digital simulation of the machines of the last century.

Rasmus speaking at the Pirate Bay support demonstration in Stockholm 3.3.2006, a day after his speech at Reboot: