101 Culture

I couldn't help but chortle as I read Wired's report of courtroom exchanges from the current Pirate Bay case.

Pirate Bay is the largest site that indexes Bit Torrent links and three people involved in running it are currently on trial in Stockholm accused of breaking copyright law. Its traffic ranks around 109th in the world.

Just picture a hotshot proscecutor interrogating a slightly disheveled, young, geekish defendant with the intent of finding the one mastermind behind the collection of allegedly illicit hyperlinks on the site. His route in, it seems,  is to establish who is the person with ultimate responsibility over the text and images on the site.

But he fails to understand the loose structure of the community that has access to the server. "But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic," "No. Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it."

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't have so perceptively expressed the confusion created at the meeting of those that web and those that don't. And as if the latter point needed making more clearly, in referring to his own motivation for managing the server, he expresses why so much of the web exists, and why it so baffles most of us, "There is no other place I could face these technical challenges except large firms where I would be top-ridden by bosses". He does it for the love of the craft. [image from]