Piracy and Prometheus

Imagine there's a Somalian-Swedish IT joint venture that indexes pirate treasure. "We only provide a ship tracking and treasure mapping service. If we didn't do this, booty would be retrieved some other way," shrugs the founder, then lapsing out of CEO-speak mode briefly to add: "Screw the man, yo!" and high-five-ing his co-founder.

Clearly the existence of such a service provider would be unacceptable to most people and this leads me to believe that the Swedish court made the right call from a technical standpoint when it convicted the Pirate Bay founders of whatever it convicted them of, even though the court apparently, judging from the facts, lacks any power to order them to cease and desist, even on contempt charges.

Yes, it's technically the right call, if we're talking pirates (and aren't we all, these days): it even satisfies the maritime piracy test -- maritime law also defines as piracy any act that abets or intentionally facilitates piracy.

Arr!

But of course it's not really piracy. That's just a word. Daniel Defoe's, I think, but still, only a word.

Over the years, we agreed collectively that piracy on the seas involves one or more of these three: violence, detention, depredation.

With file transfer, violence and hostage-taking are not usually involved -- unless you are listening to MP3s at Phil Spector's house. And then you are considered crewmates.

Possibly the third one is involved: depredation. A contract is waylaid. Goods are intercepted and never delivered. But really, though?

I think not. I take the bloody-minded view that the record companies are dopes. The record company bought goods from the artist -- let's think of the goods as a volatile solid that the company had a good process for canning. Unfortunately something happened (global warming? AC failure due to the amps in the studio blowing a fuse?) -- after the goods were delivered and the contract performed -- and the goods sublimed into a gas. It escaped. Now people are becoming mass consumers of the goods without packaging because they no longer find its packaging an attractive sales argument. Well, duh: the packaging is no longer necessary. The goods are literally everywhere. A technology even exists to pick up and collect stray molecules of gas into torrents that are distilled and precipitated into the end-user's receptacle.

It's not a perfect metaphor, but neither is trying to treat ideas as matter in the first place, or trying to bend property law to somehow satisfactorily cover all the bases.

With regard to the shift that caused 100 years of recordings to suddenly sublime into a gas, I see something Promethean in it. The reality of what has just happened renders any discussion of restitution irrelevant.

Clearly digital file transfer is something that's very much out of the bag, and the record companies are trying futilely to put it back in. It is as if they are going around the campfires trying to levy taxes on use of flint. It's all rather stupid.

In the gods' situation, the only thing left to do was to punish the mortal upstart very harshly. Only a year in jail? I would say the Pirate Bay is lucky. Even if they were offering a service in Somalia, it might have been their entrails.