Two Slashes

I was going to write about something else, but this is more time-relevant.  Therefore, that other post will get put on a back burner (and probably end up not seeing the light of day).

Today marks a monumental day in the history of the Internet.

The first thing on everyone’s mind (or mine, at least) is the trial of masterminds Anakata and Brokep (also known as Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, respectively), which starts tomorrow.  If you don’t know, they’re the two people most responsible for the day-to-day operations of The Pirate Bay, the Internet’s favorite public tracker and torrent search site.

According to TorrentFreak, a large press conference was held today in hopes of answering questions before the trial got underway.  Overall, the reported questions and answers were boring, but this response from Sunde caught my attention:

I do not believe The Pirate Bay will be a major player in five years. But I think BitTorrent technology will improve. File sharing will always exist. I think people will tire of the debate.

This statement has some interesting connotations, especially coming from one of the administrators of a site that just won’t stay down.  Sure, the existence (or lack thereof) of TPB is something that needs to be checked and double-checked on a daily basis, but there’s a certain truth that bigger and better things should be expected.  (You can look at the evolution of other sites like Suprnova, Mininova, and IsoHunt if you don’t believe me or if you find the topic interesting enough to continue pursuing.)

As a computer science major, I’m also intrigued by the suggestion that BitTorrent will be around.  It’s a novel technology at heart (err…pun unintentional?), but if you look at the road that we (as a civilization) followed to get to this point, a better wheel is bound to come along at some point, if only to satisfy the human desire for the distribution of information.  It’s just a matter of when.

Trials aside, on the other side of copyright law is a blackout movement in protest of New Zealand’s newly-adopted and overzealous copyright law.  If the vague definitions of an ISP (which just about anyone with a website falls under) don’t get you, surely you’ll find yourself accused by a neighbor anyway (and left without an Internet connection, to boot).  In my opinion, that’s even worse than the current police state of bandwidth caps and filtering we have going on here in the United States.

While I won’t be participating directly (you try changing your profile picture on a few dozen sites all at once only to change them back next week; it was bad enough trying to eliminate my birthday), feel free to black out any avatars you have and show some support (if you think it will do any good).

I suppose an alternative course would be to change your avatar to the Pirate Bay logo as an indicator of your support for the trial.  Of course, that’s still a lot of profile images to cycle out.