Interview here:

Customers of the Danish internet service provider TDC have as of today no access to the popular search engine www.thepiratebay.org

So this would be a good reason to finally make the shift to another ISP.. But if you still use TDC and understand Danish then here is a guide to get access to the pirate bay anyway: http://www.piratgruppen.org/spip.php?article871 (mac) and http://www.piratgruppen.org/wiki/index.php/DNS_Blocking (pc)

But probably it is only a matter of a few months before the site is taken offline for real, as a court trial will open in Stockholm soon.

In the mean time you can support the pirate bay by buying cool merchandise or support and join the party at the trial in Stockholm! See you

Yesterday the popular Swedish musician Timbuktu suddenly turned up on the front page of www.thepiratebay.org – the search engine with three million registered users and an average of 16 million daily peers. Timbuktu has a new album coming up, so this is a very clever move. We are not sure but probably Timbuktu realized that why stop “piracy” when you can embrace it?

The Pirate Bay sometimes do campaigns like this but of course not every artist can be lucky to get this kind of exposure.

One could argue that in the Timbuktu case The Pirate Bay has become a mass medium. An interesting discussion follows whether the bay is falling into traditional structures where only very popular content of lowest common denominator is findable. The pirate bay is much more though – we know – but there is some truth in it since most people go to other sites for more niche content.

Reading a few blogs recently lead us to a campaign against filesharing from 2006 initiated by Rettighedsalliancen. Mostly short commercials with a moralising pay-off regarding copying. Somehow these films already seem so out-dated. It would be interesting to make a longer film only with different “don’t download”-films, just to keep as a kind of memory of how the copyright debate has developed. Here is a Danish one with film maker Søren Fauli, bleached hair and all.

We also remember some similar ones with Casper Christensen and maybe Pernille Rosendahl but we couldn’t find them on the internet. We wonder if they would want to be in a similar kind of campaign today?
And here is one with Jack Black in a more ironic approach. We are not sure how to understand it though.

In our own cinema we always start screenings with this one.

Drop us a line if you have links to other videos in the same genre, then we will update this post with more video.

Vi følger op med et hurtigt referat på dansk fra aftenens fildelingsdebat.

Der blev talt og diskuteret meget omkring online fildeling og navnlig The Pirate Bay, som endnu en gang var repræsenteret ved Peter Sunde.
Selve diskussionen nåede aldrig rigtigt at komme ud over kanten, idet Morten Bay konsekvent og i bedste politikerstil fejede en lang række relevante spørgsmål af banen i forhold til rettighedsspørgsmålet og moderne medier. Det var egentlig heller ikke så heldigt for denne fløj i panelet, at Søren Fauli i begyndelsen fik ordet i fem minutter og her fortalte, at han da sandelig også selv hentede masser ned fra bl.a. The Pirate Bay. Han syntes alligevel, at man skulle kompensere for “kunstnernes” vigende indtægter ved at påføre en månedlig afgift for overhovedet at kunne logge på nettet. Denne idé blev siden fulgt op af både Morten Bay og Emil Jørgensen dog i en lidt mere frelst udgave, at forbrugerne selv skulle tilmelde sig lige netop den form for abonnement der dækkede éns behov??? Så begyndte regnen af kritiske spørgsmål at vælte ned over panelet. “Hva’ med software, hvordan skal det kompenseres? Eller bøger, fotos, opskrifter osv. Skulle man også tilmelde sig abonnementer dér eller hvad? Og hvad skulle det i så fald koste?
Det gode ved denne debat er nok i virkeligheden, at jo mere der bliver diskuteret, desto klarere bliver det, at flere og flere af jakkesættene falder fra og størstedelen af befolkningen slet ikke kan få øje på, hvad fordelen ved ikke at downloade og fildele og remixe osv. skulle bestå i.

If you are in Copenhagen then don’t miss this event about filesharing in Kødbyen on May 29th – or about “fremtidens kulturmarked” as they write. Read more here – see you.

Danish internet provider and tele operator TDC has launched a “digital music revolution”. We feel that we have to comment.

With PLAY TDC launches no less than a digital music revolution. In close cooperation with the biggest record labels in the world and in Denmark we now make a huge number of songs available for free to our broadband and mobile customers. We call it PLAY. With PLAY you can download as many songs you like at tdc.dk/musik. (rough translation).

But what is wrong with this concept? Well there is so much wrong that we don’t know where to start..

1) What the citation above doesn’t say is that the files you download are windows media files infected with DRM – disguised as a “license” – which makes it impossible to play the songs on other devices than the one you downloaded it to. So you cannot transfer it to your ipod or listen to it in the car or send to a friend on msn. No customers can accept this.
What we see here is TDC and the record labels trying to treat the digital file as a physical product that can’t be copied. In these days when the tendency is going towards DRM-free music we find it odd and just hopelessly old-fashioned to launch a DRM-driven service. TDC will soon be way behind other players in the field of digital music.

2) If you cancel your TDC subscription, your downloaded files will be erased automatically. So you only borrow the files.. Again, no customer should accept this.

3) You can download millions of songs from PLAY, but in reality it is a closed off market with a few record labels deciding what is for download. In the end it doesn’t matter when everything is available on file sharing networks for free – free as in unlimited, high quality mp3 and without DRM.

What the record labels probably think is that the customers can find good music through PLAY and then go to the iTunes store and buy the music without DRM. And when TDC furthermore wants to pay the record labels millions of euros to do their marketing, well then why not? Maybe TDC didn’t think of this.

We say: let people pay for the music if they want to. But sell it without DRM. And if they don’t want to pay, then they can download it for free somewhere else.

It is scary to think of how much money TDC put into this useless project. In the video below CEO Jens Alder mentions the employees of TDC twice (in Danish):

I EU-kommisionen er man tæt på at vedtage en række uheldige resolutioner omkring adgang til internet. Det handler om internet-filtre, licenser, DRM osv.

Vi er lidt sent ude, men kommisionen har faktisk oprettet en spørgeskemaservice, hvor du indtil i morgen 29. februar kan komme med din mening – læs mere her, hvor du kan downloade spørgeskemaet og derefter sende dine svar på email direkte til kommisionen.

Erik og Michael skriver speciale om konceptet bag 200 DJs. De har oprettet en blog, hvor man kan følge med i overvejelserne. Indtil videre er bloggen et internt værktøj med noter og kan vel nærmest betegnes som en “stream of consciousness”. Men hvis du interesserer dig for begreber som situeret software, online/offline, web 2.0, fælles produktion af kultur, fildeling, decentralisering og i det hele taget for det progressive projekt www.200djs.dk, så må du hellere følge med på bloggen..

The Oil of the 21st Century – Perspectives on Intellectual Property er navnet på en konference om kultur og fildeling, hvis første del foregik i Berlin i sidste weekend.

Alle, der er noget ved musikken inden for fildeling i Europa, var til stede, og samtlige deltagere var sådan set for fildeling. Formålet var heller ikke at diskutere for eller imod fildeling, men at stille flere spørgsmål end svar og at skabe nysgerrighed om fremtiden.

Fremtidsmæssigt var paneldebatten kaldet Filesharing as cultural industry den mest interessante, fordi den foregik på et meget konkret plan. Paneldeltagere var Peter fra The Pirate Bay, Eric fra Mininova, redaktøren fra Torrentfreak og Jamie King fra Steal This Film. The Pirate Bay og Mininova er de to største torrent-sider. Under debatten kom det frem, hvor idealistiske motiver det er, der driver folkene bag The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay styres af blot tre personer, og siden er ansvarlig for 35 % af Europas internettrafik. De har flere sideprojekter kørende, blandt andet er de i gang med at lave en slags youtube-klon i protest mod normaliseringen af youtube efter Googles opkøb. Teknikken bag sitet, som nok bliver lanceret i starten af 2008, minder lidt om Joost, idet indholdet streames fra forskellige brugeres harddiske og ikke fra en central server – men projektet adskiller sig fra Joost ved at være hinsides copyright og alle former for censur (naturligvis!). De er også i gang med et ambitiøst projekt om at skrive en ny bittorrent-protokol. Det nye format vil være bagudkompatibelt med .torrent-filer og formentlig få endelsen .p2p. Årsagen til at et nyt format er ønskeligt er, at koden omkring bittorrentprotokollen er blevet lukket, og at det i dag er relativt nemt for spammere og antipiratorganisationer at sprede dårligt materiale.

Mininova derimod står for en mere pragmatisk tilgang og eksperimenterer for øjeblikket med at lade store underholdningsorganisationer sprede indhold via mininova.org, mod at visse ting så som bestemte musikalbums og film filtreres væk fra siden (eller noget i den retning). Det bliver spændende at se, hvad brugerne siger til det.

Læs mere om konferencen og kommede events på http://oil21.org/?events