If you don't know about The Pirate bay, a file sharing website where you could download any music, movie or computer program ever created, you need to. 1, Because you could download free pirated music, movies, or computer program without any repercussions of getting caught. 2, Because the creators of the Thepiratebay.org are currently on trial for copyright infringement, in which the verdict will provide a landscape as to what file sharing will look like in the near future.

The generic starting point of the conversation as to whether are not illegal file sharing is ethical or not begins with the music and movie industry. Companies like Sony and Warner Brothers argue that they are losing money by illegal downloads especially from websites like Thepiratebay.org. Even rapper Lil Wayne, who sold one million copies of his last album, The Carter III, also lost money by one million illegal album downloads before the album was even released earlier this year. Although this may seem like a favorable argument for the entertainment industry, this is only the generic starting point. The real starting point of the argument is about access to information and about information distribution.

In 2006, Thepiratebay was temporally shut down after the Swedish company was raided by the police. The raid brought a lawsuit against the 4 man team (Frederick Neij, Gottfried Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom). In 2008 all 4 men of Thepiratebay were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and fined closed to 3 million dollars. The team appealed the cased and the final verdict will be given on November 22nd of this year.

On the surface these four guys may seem like some punks with nothing better to do -but having paid attention to these guys for the last few months a couple of things appear to be true, they probably smoke a lot of weed, they are some true archetypes for what ever a real life Revenge of the Nerds person would look like and that their intelligence level seems genius like. In court the argument for defending themselves is a rather weak one. They simply claim that they themselves never broke any copyright laws, they simply hosted a websites where millions of other people did, but it's easy to understand why they would use this as their defense; What they are doing is so grand, that a judge cannot even possibly understand the magnitude of what they are actually doing because our current laws do not even facilitate what's at hand. Thepiratebay is literally: a part of a changing social platform, that is not the wave of the future. . . it is the wave of NOW. In other words, what they are doing is simply what the rest of the world is doing to access information, illegal or not, file sharing is this generations way of transporting communication.

The internet as is stands now, doesn't have any laws applied to it. There is no governing body that decides what goes up or not, and the only things that will get you in trouble has more to do with self incriminating evidence such as, terrorism, child pornography, or just simply uploading a video of a crime that you've committed. The internet could literally be interpreted as the live representation of our human consciousness, the actual thinking process of humanity as a whole. The efforts against Thepiratebay, are completely useless and even more so than the efforts against Napster- the music pirate download king of the 90's. See Napster was created by an American kid, sanctioned by American laws. Thepiratebay guys are not Americans, they bring with them a movement of supporters from around the world (after the police raid in 2006, thousands of young people gathered in Sweden for a rally in support of the Thepiratebay) - that see the copyright infringement laws as a continuum of America's global domination via Hollywood. To put it simply, the rest of the world, who also has an equal voice on the internet platform could care less about what Hollywood thinks about file sharing.

File Sharing is the real Fight Club

I'm reminded of the movie Fight Club as Edward Nortons character watches as bombs assembled by his terrorist organization explode, crumbling down banks, in an effort to eradicate a consumer driven society. File sharing fulfills the goal of the Fight Club without having to resort to bombs and it does this in several ways, but most importantly by challenging the notion of intellectual property, in other words, 'do ideas or thoughts themselves belong to anyone?'

It use to be the case through out human history that information was to be kept away from the masses and only giving to a select few as a means to distribute power. The best example, but by no means the only example, is the Bible which was kept away from the masses for centuries. In fact it would be completely appropriate to suggest that 'books' are perhaps the fastest vehicle before the internet to lead us to rebellion and emancipation. But unlike books, which are read one by one, and consumed in slow amounts, the internet provides practically any information ever created to the internet user, at any moment anywhere so long as the user has a computer and internet connection.

But there is also a more important element at hand. While the Hollywood notion of stardom collapses it also creates a new platform as to what fame, talent, and beauty could mean- being that while file sharing eradicates the economy of Hollywood it crumbles the notion of fame, talent and beauty with it. File sharing shifts the economic model of a consumer based society, to a producer based society. It then allows a global pathway for others to also share their information through file sharing, whether it be their music, independent movies, art, or what have you, giving access for everyone to define what is beautiful and what is talented. This could really be the platform for a true world democratic process.

In a documentary on Thepiratebay, Sebastian Lutgert of the Pirate Cinema, a pirate cinema organization based out of Germany that promotes independent films as well as pirates cinema and distributes it for free, states that "intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century." The idea seems quite extreme, but when put into proper context (that we are truly living in a open access information age)- the notion of what you know because of what information you may have access to then begins to crumble. We now have access to the complete pool of knowledge. . .and as they say. . . knowledge is power.

STEAL THIS FILM: DOCUMENTARY ON THE PIRATE BAY