In praise of file sharing

Thanks to my compatriots at Pirate Bay, the collected cultural heritage of mankind is now about to become available to every person with access to the internet. Music, films, tv programs — the lot! With the help of Bittorrent software, all computers everywhere are borrowing files from each other in what surely must be the greatest cultural exchange program ever devised.

Forget the latest Hollywood blockbusters, they leave me cold. What I want are things like Rasta Hunden, a ska-punk band from my days growing up in Sundsvall, northern Sweden. Rasta Hunden had a great record out in 1980 which, for a while, was a minor hit even outside of our dreary industrial wasteland of a town. Sitting here in Taiwan, I rediscovered it and now I can play it to my children while telling them about my misspent youth.

The same goes for a lot of old music. We bought those albums as LPs, we bought them as cassettes, we bought them as CDs. The original artists and their record companies got our money already three times over. It’s not their music anymore, it’s ours.

Besides, the technological innovations which made it possible to continuously charge us for the same products did not originate with the big record or movie companies. They are just profiteering from technological breakthroughs which others have achieved. Sock it to the greedy bastards!