Steal This Film II director Jamie King puts forth a good critique of the current approach of government and ISPs to filesharing.

King has a quote eminently capturing the essence of The Pirate Bay’s philosophy from admin Peter Sunde:

> They are not legitimate users on our system, and we do not accept their harvesting of IPs, since it’s not productive. Breaking into our system when you’re not invited is a violation of our terms of use. This means these ISPs have to pay a basic fee of five thousand Euros, plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation.

“They” in the quote is Tiscali UK who is monitoring P2P usage among their clients – and The Pirate Bay are here taking issue with them for the way they are investigating torrent downloaders. Peter Sunde reminds me what Tim Bray said about weekend Ruby-meetups.

> Look, dammit, Ruby isn’t an insurgency or a conspiracy or a party, it’s a profession and a vocation and we’re getting getting paid for doing it. So why the flaming hell are we meeting on weekends like Trekkies or scrapbookers?

It’s with exactly the same philosophy, a sense of “you are what you act like”, that The Pirate Bay has taken torrents and p2p from fringe to mainstream – with incredible balls at times (remember their bid to purchase Sealand?).

Not to get hung up on the balls of the Pirate Bay admins, but if said balls seem less incredible nowadays it’s only because they themselves brought the issues out from the shadows and in to the mainstream of un-ignorable politics. Into the light