ON May 31, the Swedish police raided the headquarters of a major file-sharing Web site and hauled off hundreds of computer servers along with two men, in handcuffs, they suspected of being movie pirates.
The raid was an evidence-gathering exercise, and no charges have yet been filed, but Sweden, it seems, has finally become serious about cracking down on digital piracy after years of complacency. Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, crowed that the raid showed that “there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves.”
But just a month later, Quinn Norton, a reporter, sat in a living room in Malmo, Sweden, with the same men who were detained, and a third who was not, as they laughed and watched an illicit copy of the movie “Spanglish.”
Pirate Bay — the most notorious, most hunted digital-piracy outfit in the world — was back. Ms. Norton tells their story in a two-part series for Wired News (wired.com).
The operators of Pirate Bay, Ms. Norton writes, see their work as a cause. They believe that current copyright laws are “a broken artifact of a pre-digital age, the gristle of a rotting business model that poison culture and creativity.”
The outcome of the case against Pirate Bay — and by extension of the continuing copyright wars — may hinge partly on politics and public opinion in Sweden, where, Ms. Norton writes, file-sharing has become “an institution.”
So much so that a new political party, the Pirate Party, is making headway there. After the raid, membership in the Pirate Party zoomed past that of the Green Party. There were street demonstrations and attacks on government computers.
But public opinion on Pirate Bay waxes and wanes. It suffered a public relations blow when a newspaper discovered that the group’s Web site was generating $84,000 a month in ad revenue. It turned out, Ms. Norton writes, that a Web site “ostensibly dedicated to a selfless ideal, and which solicits donations, was turning a tidy profit.”
PEAS IN A Dave and Carolee Ellison, owners of Mach 5 Products, invented a handy gizmo that digitally counts the number of winning tickets or prizes dispensed by arcade games — like the ones where players try to grab prizes with a crane. They called it the Profit Pod.
That didn’t sit well with Apple Computer, which notified the couple that their use of the word “pod” infringed on its copyright for the iPod.
“Even if the product you make doesn’t look, smell, feel, or do anything remotely close to what an iPod does, and even if consumers can’t buy it on the shelves in a store, that apparently doesn’t mean Apple won’t release its legal dogs on you if the name of your product includes the letters P-O-D,” wrote David Berlind in ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog (blogs.zdnet.com).
He cited Apple’s letter to the Ellisons: “We believe there is confusing similarity between Apple’s IPOD mark and the PROFIT POD mark,” it read, adding that both the iPod and the Profit Pod were small, flat, round-cornered devices with display screens.
Mr. Berlind took his case directly to Apple’s chief executive. “Mr. Jobs, this is simply over the top. Leave these nice people, who are in no way a threat to you or Apple, alone.”
A HEALTHY SIGN McDonald’s, which has been trying to repair its image as a purveyor of unhealthy fat- and sugar-laden foods, is giving away toy Hummers, which celebrate a product that has earned General Motors a reputation for being a purveyor of unhealthy, gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing vehicles.
The Ronald McHummer sign-o-matic (ronaldmchummer.com) — which is not affiliated with the restaurant — enables users to create their own McDonald’s signs. Fill out a form, and your message appears under the Golden Arches. Recent messages include “Note: Hummers do not fit thru our drive thru” and “No, in fact we don’t care about the planet. Give us your money.” There are dissenting voices, however. One sign reads: “Warning: Hippie nonsense is bad.”
DAN MITCHELL
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