Yaaarrrrrr

There's an intriguing article on Vanity Fair called The Pirates of the Multiplex, looking at the Swedish dudes from The Pirate Bay. TPB are probably the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world, enabling millions of users in hundreds of countries to share music, movies, tv shows and all manner of other content. The US government have put pressure on the Swedish government to go after the TPB guys, but there's a lot of support in Sweden for them, most notably from The Pirate Party, a Swedish political group with ideals of copyright reform and personal privacy.

It's a wild, adventurous story, with awesome Viking names like Gottfrid Svartholm scattered throughout, but I kinda get the feeling they're going to get hammered eventually. Unless Sweden actually goes ahead with copyright reforms, and explicitly tells the US to get bent, someone's eventually going to pull the plugs on their servers. This isn't to say I don't think what they're doing is fairly legendary, and is actually making the world a better place by re-iterating the basic fact that digital content is a hyper-abundant resource, but they've got a rather large target on their backs and their hunters are rather well-connected and well-financed.