Äpplen och päron

[IN SWEDISH]
SR ringde. De ville göra något slags scoop om att Timbuktu lanserar sin nya singel gratis via The Pirate Bay. Antar att deras ”tänk” var att Timbuktu nu skulle riskera dålig publicitet efter den senaste kontroversen kring sajtens länkning till känsliga offentliga data. Men jag tror inte det. Jag tror dagens mediekonsumenter är mycket mer mångfacetterade än så, och att man måste skilja mellan äpplen och päron. Förundersökningar och popmusik. Och dessutom se bakgrunden till både Timbuks och TPB:s egna varumärkesbyggande.
Popmusik i form av mp3-filer var en av de första typer av populärkulturella produkter som började massdistribueras på dedikerade fildelningsnätverk. Redan runt år 2000 var det många hiphop-, rock- och technoartister som antingen aktivt använde sig av mp3:or som ett viralt verktyg för att sprida sin musik och skapa sig ett namn, eller mer passivt såg på medan deras musik kopierades, helt gratis, och därmed bidrog till att göra dem mer etablerade som artister. Några exempel på detta var Fattaru, Ison & Fille, José González och andra som slog igenom i början av tvåtusentalet.
   Samtidigt är ju The Pirate Bay, som Oscar Swartz skrev för ett tag sedan, mera rock’n’roll än den skråbaserade musikbransch som slåss mot dem. Sajten och den piratromantiserande mylla den springer ur (Piratbyrån, piratpartiet, kopimi) har sedan första början varit förknippad med en image som andats rätt mycket antiglobaliseringsvänster, veganism, Samfundet Mot Plågsamma Djurförsök, fri fildelning till alla, ”välfärd börjar vid 100Mbit” etc.
TPB har således rent imagemässigt, eller åtminstone sett till de målgrupper man gemensamt delat, stått proggaren Timbuktu väldigt nära.
   Dock riskerar denna image nu enligt mig att stegvis glömmas bort eller missförstås allteftersom sajten framstår som monolitisk, normativ, annonsdriven, porrbefrämjande och godmodigt befästande av sitt eget varumärke. Trots att det kommersiella intryck sajten kan tänkas ge är missvisande vad gäller ren inkomst (sajten är och förblir ett minusprojekt, intygar bland annat Peter Sunde), kan den aspekten av deras framtoning fortfarande sätta dem i problematiska situationer när de – som vi ju såg häromveckan – tvingas försöka ratta medierelationer som skulle vara stora utmaningar för den mest luttrade kommunikationsstrateg.
   Därför är samarbetet med Timbuktu helt logiskt. Hans plattor sprids redan ändå på fildelningsnätverken, och han ser inga större problem med det. Dessutom hjälper det TPB-fansen att påminnas om var sajten kommer ifrån; fingret åt etablissemanget och samtidigt en ny form av affärsidé där fundamentalistiska upphovsrättsprinciper sätts åt sidan till förmån för t-shirtförsäljning och fler potentiella konsertbokningar. Istället för att dogmatiskt profilera sig som ”anti-kommersell” och ”anti-establishment” på ren autopilot, så etablerar TPB och Timbuk här nya plattformar för autonomt kulturskapande och vinning annan än den rent monetära. Med andra ord: 99-tänk istället för 68-tänk. Det är därför inte ens oväntat att Timbuk gör detta. Hade det varit Bodies Without Organs eller Per Gessle hade det kanske varit mer av en nyhet.

Dessutom, sett till sajtens monolitiska ställning och popularitet, som ju de senaste veckornas kontrovers kom att visa, är TPB lite att jämföra med en ”portal” eller ett ansikte för fildelningen som livsstil och folkrörelse. Om vi ska uttrycka det i klyschor: ”en aftonbladet.se för piratgenerationen”.
   Men när aftonbladet.se gör regelbundna övertramp, moraliskt och kommersiellt (till exempel i hur man exponerar och profiterar på enskilda människoöden) så finns det ju ingen relevans i att samtidigt kritisera de övriga verksamheter detta mediehus sysslar med. Man kan inte kritisera Aftonbladets DVD-bilaga, kampanjerbjudanden eller korsordstävlingar med grund i deras nyhetsredaktions pressetik i känsliga frågor.
   På samma sätt är TPB stora nog att allmänheten kan se att man sysslar med en väldigt heterogen, blandad verksamhet. Visst kan man tjäna pengar, använda sig av vissa medel, men samtidigt ha uttalade mål som delvis ursäktar dessa medel. Man kan göra en tabbe inom ett visst etisk parerutrymme som man har tilldelats, utan att för den skull få hela sin verksamhet misstänkliggjord.
   Vad man gör i sin hantering av allmänhetens ilska och motvilja till ens direktpublicering av känligt förundersökningsmaterial är en annan fråga än vad man gör av ett jippo där man klappar en artist på axeln för att han sällar sig till de informella distributionskanaler som redan existerar.
   Man måste skilja mellan äpplen och päron.

Detta är också vad många av de jag intervjuat (som del av mitt forskningsarbete) menar. Medielandskapet har aldrig varit mer heterogent, brusigt, bubbligt och ofta motsägelsefullt än vad det är idag. Och konsumenterna är mer sofistikerade än vad vi tidigare kanske trott. Man laddar ner en film på TPB, men detta förbjuder inte att man senare ändå köper den på DVD. Samma film ges ett år senare bort som hårdsponsrad DVD-bilaga till en dagstidning, i vilket fall som helst. En nedladdning fungerar ofta som en förhandstitt, en preview på saker man inte visste man skulle gilla annars.

Magnus Uggla (ej att förväxlas med Timbuktu)		I somras fick Expressenläsarna super-subventionerade CD-skivor med Magnus Ugglas samlade magnum opus på köpet med tidningen om de ville. Samtidigt spriddes illegala kopior av den hit som samma Thomas Dam-troll hade 1976, ”Sommartid”, på landets trendigaste mp3-bloggar, eftersom den här låten nu anses vara en svensk balearic-klassiker och därmed legitimerat cool i vissa innerstadskretsar.

Så komplicerad, och direkt motsägelsefull är dagens medievärld. Det går inte riktigt att summera i enkla scoop om att ”Timbuktus image blir förstörd när han samarbetar med TPB”.

Afterthoughts on the recent Pirate Bay controversy

...and hopefully the beginning of a debate on what “making public” really means in an era of rapidly increasing digital accessibility and complex media ecologies.

On Thursday 11 September, Swedish public service television SVT hosted a debate on the affair which The Pirate Bay has recently been the focus of. This whole affair flared up due to the Swedish commercial broadcaster TV4 making the “scoop” that public documents containing forensic evidence from a recent, very well-known Swedish murder case were floating around as BitTorrent files, and that the initial link to these files was posted on the site in question. A veritable torrent of interest was then generated by this TV4 news story, and the number of downloads of said torrent increased near-exponentially.
    I was invited to speak in the SVT debate. My role was thought to be “the ambivalent researcher” and I was invited thanks to the somewhat original interpretation I made of the event earlier on this blog. I could not make it for the live airing, though, and instead I wrote a Swedish version of said post for the SVT website. In retrospect, I was actually happy not to participate: the debate became, despite of some of the editors’ good intentions, a farce. Peter Sunde, the press spokesman for The Pirate Bay, was alone forced to answer for a whole phenomenon which is, in fact, much bigger than the website he represents.
This was very much my argument in the initial post: The Pirate Bay are caught in a split position where they on the one hand provide a blind, “neutral” carrier service but on the other one sport a brand which now symbolizes a veritable “people’s movement” of file-sharing and piracy. They are in some respects near-monolithic as a torrent link provider, present a highly accessible portal to the torrent world, and have become known for a rather cocky, highly controversial approach against their adversaries. This latter role has increasingly made them a sitting target for many of “the evils of the net,” which this case so painfully came to show.
The father of the murdered children appeared on a live link in the SVT studio, and the whole narrative came to focus more on the pictures per se rather than on the problems of hosting truly public archives in an era of drastically eased availability thanks to the Internet and p2p technologies. Read Sunde’s and my fellow researcher Dr Karl Palmås’s comments for a flavour of how disillusioned many people must have felt after the show. (These comments are in Swedish; try Google Translate to get a crude translation.)
    The Pirate Bay has remained relentless in their principled position not to give in to any attempts of censoring the Internet. This is, in the long run, probably a good thing: they get to keep their integrity while more and more people in the general population get to understand the ways in which BitTorrent works and that the anonymous posting of a link is a wholly new form of making-public. What is more problematic though, is that it might solidify the notion that the site is merely a technical actor, akin to an automaton rather than to an assemblage of various human wills and technical obstacles.
    Another result of the debate was that The Pirate Bay on the 12th of September renounced all contact with the traditional mass media, for the overseeable future. Whether this will serve the site’s long-term aspirations or mean that their public image will slip out of their own hands remains to be seen.

The interests and range of action of The Pirate Bay
In trying to make an attempt to go further, I will hereby outline some initial facts.
The Pirate Bay let their users post torrent links, and the website then indexes these links. It is in the interest of the site to maintain the full anonymity of these users (otherwise many users would probably hesitate about posting in the first place). The site thus provides an infrastructure, similar to many other p2p networks. This is what I referred to as their original role, in my previous article.
    In addition, the site have been extremely efficient in what they do. So efficient that they have become a veritable brand, a face for file-sharing as a movement. According to Sunde (private correspondence) this is more thanks to bravado than to technical skill per se. I would further add to this the site’s peculiar ability for a set of non-conventional marketing and “brand management” skills which have served them well until now. Their index of links is centralised, and is diligently presented under their eponymous banner. This makes them visible as actors, and – in many people’s view – orders them to fulfil some form of general publicist responsibility.
Because the fact is that they can remove the links from their index.
Naturally, they do not want to do that though, since it would be “an own goal” in terms of opening up for veto rights for any user who would disagree on the publication of any given piece of content. Potentially, every complainant would then enforce the removal of content. Obviously this is neither in the site’s own interest, nor in the interest of the world’s Internet users at large.
    In addition, one could, as many people have done (including Sunde himself), speculate in the “Streisand effect”: if one link is removed this hardly decreases the circulation of the linked material, but tends to lead to a backlash of numerous alternative links being put up, meaning that even more Internet users would download said material.
Moreover (this was not addressed in the TV debate), The Pirate Bay can make public the identity of the user initially posting the link and thus bearing responsibility for the commencement of the files’ circulation.
A similar dilemma arises here: If the site would do this, it would instantly be rendered untrustworthy for its own users. “What if I get exposed for the torrent I posted last Tuesday?” Hence, this is neither in the site’s interest, and it would erode the function that the Internet has as a vent for anonymous distribution of data.
The Pirate Bay are, in other words, not a blind, neutral machine with its hands tied, as to say, when it comes to adjusting, managing or rectifying its use of data. It is no automaton, blindly executing the seemingly given or necessary functions of the Internet. As all other technical institutions it has users, moderators, administrators etc who actually can censor themselves.
Still, this need not mean that they would – or should – do so.

Different degrees of making-public
As I have described earlier, an indexing of torrent links constitutes one among many other forms of making-public; that is, publication.
Publication is not an absolute term; there are degrees of making public. A document passing in or out of a Swedish public institution is by default defined as legally public. However, parts of it can be censored under certain conditions. Further, due to more recent data protection laws (PUL), an administrative document like this can actually be public yet simultaneously not intended for further circulation, or mass-reproduction.
    In the now-infamous case, as so often when Internet technologies are involved, the agency which acts to make public does not reside in but one actor. It is rather to be seen as an upshot of the sad configuration which arises between actors in a media ecology we are still grasping to fully understand:

the prosecutor who, initially, fails to censor the sensitive parts of the document + The Pirate Bay user Beckroth who makes a torrent link of the material + The Pirate Bay itself, which hosts, indexes, orchestrates the further reproduction + Swedish TV4 which in its coverage of the case makes it known for the greater public, and consequently triggers mass interest + “the general public” who initiate a proverbial avalanche of downloads + SVT which further re-hashes the story and triggers yet further mass interest + the media studies PhD student who delves into the case even further = a potent combination of affects furthering the entire controversy

And, to apply potential degrees of making-public to the actors involved:

prosecutor : publication with potentially small circulation
Beckroth : duplication, with potentially enormous yet, in practice, small circulation
TPB : increases the accessibility, through facilitating beckroth’s duplication and making a dedicated indexing of the link (in this actual case, small circulation before TV4 entered the situation)
TV4 : drastically increase the circulation, as a bi-effect of their mass-media exposure and coverage of the case
SVT : partially assists in increasing the circulation, as a bi-effect of their coverage

Surely, SVT and especially TV4 have a responsibility here. However, these established, traditional mass media institutions have chief editors and publishers, who are elected to take the blame for the actions of such institutions. This time, much of the news value for these established actors existed in the novelty of the whole situation; in this very slippage of responsibility. The Pirate Bay itself, as an ontological black swan – or, rather, black sheep – still generates news value in itself, in the very novelty of what they do. In addition, the site’s ontology (what it actually is) has (deliberately) been misinterpreted in several mainstream media outlets; great uncertainty has been lingering, regarding how it actually works, in operational terms.
    Surely, The Pirate Bay’s potential responsibility is only a partial share of the overall blame. But, to argue like many Internet libertarians do, that The Pirate Bay is entirely without blame is, in this overall arithmetic, a bit rich. Despite that the Internet can appear heavily determined, both technologically and historically (“These illicit circulations of material are bound to happen these days!”) it is equally easy to hide behind that sort of argument. As if The Pirate Bay was nothing but a free-floating spirit which blindly obeyed the will and purpose of the Net.
Still, it is absolutely instrumental to emphasize that they have not actively put up the images. Someone else does that act, while The Pirate Bay – like many other torrent indexes and trackers – facilitate the infrastructure to do so, anonymously.
But they can actively take down the links, and herein lied the controversy which the SVT debate program had set out to discuss. Obviously they do not want to take down the links, though, as we have seen, for understandable reasons. This very refusal was what deepened the controversy, especially when it was coupled with some initially clumsy public relations from The Pirate Bay’s side.

What everything after all boils down to is that all forms of controversial publication normally are required to have a clear sender, taking responsibility for the act of publication. So that one knows where to place the blame when someone’s integrity gets run over. But the original role for p2p-based publication (one which has roots as far back as the very conception of the Internet, which was originally p2p by both form and function) is that no such sender exists. Note that this can in many instances be very progressive, especially in terms of thwarting regimes of political censorship (authoritarian regimes all over the world) and in terms of thwarting economical censorship (copyright regimes all over the world).
    This original, nebulous, anonymous role of p2p-based file-sharing is however counteracted by the recently very public nature of The Pirate Bay, not least when they practically are a hub with considerable institutional power in Sweden (in 2006, another SVT program showed how the site’s operations had prompted U.S. American interests to lobby the Swedish government on top, ministerial level, since the site is considered to threaten U.S. American IP regimes).
    They are, in the public eye, in many ways seen as a publicist, whether they like it or not. Their original, file-sharing role is not helped by a face which is too discernable, to visible, and that was what my original article tried to (somewhat provocatively) say.
What we have to do now is to try to go beyond this particular case study and instead start debating what will happen to the policy of public communications at large in this historically new media situation.

UPDATE: Karl Palmås makes a similar conclusion in his article for SVT Opinion (Swedish only).

Apropå SVT Debatt

[IN SWEDISH]
Apropå min artikel på SVT Opinion i anslutning till TV-debatten:

Notera alltså hur jag inte säger att The Pirate Bay bör censurera sig själva.

Vad jag säger är snarare att de, i och med att de är så monolitiska inom fildelningsvärlden, måste bli klarare i att motivera sin ursprungliga roll nu när de allt mer framstår som ett varumärke, ett centraliserat index, en portal, ett ansikte för fildelningen som folkrörelse. I denna senare roll tvingas de ju verka på den arena som fortfarande domineras av vad många bloggare föraktfullt kallar "gammelmedierna", vare sig The Pirate Bay-possen vill detta eller inte. Ju större ditt varumärke är, desto känsligare för smutskastning blir du.

Snarare borde de kanske, för att bli mer effektiva, återgå till mer anonyma, decentraliserade sätt att verka. Distribuera även själva indexet i sig, kanske?

Det är idag, i det långa perspektivet, mer politiskt effektivt att starta en torrenttracker än att att göra ett massmedialt utspel á la 1968/näven i luften. The Pirate Bay var bland de första att vara med och visa detta. Kanske deras verksamhet den senaste tiden framstått, för många människor, som ett centraliserat, fordistiskt krängande av ett varumärke snarare än smygande, nebulös hacktivism? De blir därmed den uppenbara måltavlan för allt ont som finns på the internets.

"Them? Oh, I used to like them when they weren't mainstream" etc etc

The Pirate Bay: the fine line between publishing and “merely providing” data

A recent controversy illustrates the dual role of The Pirate Bay. When this infamous web site published links to files containing forensic evidence in a well-known Swedish murder case, and the victims asked to have the links removed, the website administrators staunchly refused.
Is this example of making-public controversial data to be seen as the operation of an allegedly “neutral” service provider? Or should we rather see any such operation as a form of publishing (making-public) in and by itself? Especially since The Pirate Bay is a website which does all this within a commercial remit. And more importantly: the site itself actually serves to change public opinion on what material should be publicised or best left untouched...
On the 5th of September 2008 it transpired (TT, 2008) that The Pirate Bay was making public some of the evidence from a well-known murder case in Sweden where the victims had been children. This evidence includes forensic autopsy footage, and the parents had contacted the site, begging the administrators to remove the torrent link to the material. Their request had, according to Swedish TV4 News, ultimately prompted this answer from one of the administrators: ‘You’re bloody nagging. No, no, and again, no’ (my translation). The Pirate Bay decided to keep the links despite protests from the victims’ parents and negative coverage of the whole issue in the established mass media. The site’s press spokesman Peter Sunde motivated their decision thus:

I do not think it is our task to judge whether something is ethical, or what other people want to put up on the net. People should be allowed to express themselves and spread material they think is important, that is one of the things we fight for, and that might surely be used for things which are unpleasant, however it is more important that such a possibility actually exists. (TT, 2008, my translation)

This is not only an assertion from their side to let ‘carrier neutrality’ take precedence over any publicist concerns, it also solidifies their position as a real-term institutional actor in Sweden: The national press ombudsman Yrsa Stenius was pressed to defend the ethical norms of the press in relation to their controversial publication. Such norms are not legally mandatory in Sweden, where almost all documents of public authorities are publicly available; instead they are optional, agreed rules which all publicists adhere to. In refusing this mild self-censorship of traditional publicists, The Pirate Bay’s administrators are asserting that they operate along different axes. Their guidelines, their standpoint implies, are those of the ‘carrier neutrality’ of infrastructural services.
   What they seem to overlook here, however, is that a communications network (in the sense of a telecommunications provider) is not a textual actor, or a producer of discourses. In their split role of providing an infrastructure but also a strategic, normative, sometimes-activist, sometimes-dissenting entity, their active decision that “anything goes” becomes not only a carrier decision but a publicist one as well. It is seen as if they are “making their own rules,” and thus challenging the role of publicists in a mass media climate which is already veering further to the neo-liberal agenda that “anything goes” in terms of press ethics and exploitation of individual fatalities.
   Might it be that the strong technological and historical determinism of The Pirate Bay, engrossed in a rapture of shiny new technical possibilities, blinds them to some considerations which might be inevitable if they want to keep their long-run hold on this strategic advantage? In their dogged determination to publicise almost anything, they seem to forget two things:
   1) That their decision to filter out child pornography already in itself constitutes a self-imposed, and at many times arbitrary choice to adhere to some form of ethical standards. Extending this to forensic footage is not a matter of principle but of degrees of damage limitation.
   2) It might be tempting, as a commercial actor, to publish the most controversial material possible, for sheer “shock value” alone. Yet, the decision to go-ahead with forensic footage of this kind most likely makes for a poor PR strategy: In pressing so strongly for this belief in ‘carrier neutrality,’ are they sure to risk important public support for their overall cause?
[Correction: the actual decision to go-ahead should not be considered a PR-related one, as others have noted. TPB shouldn’t shy away from material just because it is “sensitive” to someone. Instead, the PR aspect belongs to the latter role, that of how TPB as a brand/Internet portal should motivate their carrier neutrality.]
   These are not new questions. The press has always struggled with exactly the same issues in terms of self-censorship. Any good publicist would ask him-/herself whether it is right to publish simply because one can. The trouble for The Pirate Bay is that they will not see themselves as publicists, due to their split role outlined above. They are a communications service and a normative influencer of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs about what digitization actually should entail.

This is a “work in progress” extract from a longer article soon to be published in the Culture Machine journal: Doing it for the good of the net: The Pirate Bay as strategic sovereign.