To start at the beginning, The Pirate Bay deals in BitTorrents. A method of sharing very large files in an extremely efficient fashion, BitTorrents have become the cutting edge of what the RIAA and MPAA are afraid of. It’s like Napster but reliable in quality and speed. Uh oh.

Naturally, the Pirate Bay has received numerous take-down notices, asking them to remove the files from their site. Each one gets published on their website, sometimes with a snarky reply, and they have—as of this writing—never deleted a single torrent. Ever. Not even one.

A grand majority of the comments on Digg express hearty congratulations to the Pirates for standing strong in the face of rude American media conglomerates (it should be noted that The Pirate Bay operates from Sweden which has markedly different copyright laws than the U.S.). However, there are plenty of comments like the following:

I hope the pirate bay knows in the US, divulging trade secrets has the same punishment as treason.

Keep “fighting against the man” kids, then sit back and bitch when prices are going up. Hopefully the end result will be your mom and dad will lose their jobs and you’ll have to pay for those new rims you got for your Honda by working at McDonalds.

I hope they catch these leeches and “waterboard” them.

Such venom!

What the debate really boils down to is a discussion of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional ethics. Under what level of development is The Pirate Bay operating? Here are the typical reasons that people follow rules:

1. Pre-conventional. Rules are followed only out of fear of the consequences. Might is right. If you can enforce it, it is moral.
2. Conventional. Rules are followed because they’re the rules. Society wouldn’t function without them. Right?
3. Post-conventional. Rules are followed when they’re good rules. Otherwise, personal codes of ethics take precedent.

Which of these apply to The Pirate Bay? They are obviously not afraid of the consequences; in fact, they verbally abuse their accusers. U.S. copyright laws do not apply to them, since they’re in Sweden (and Swedish society seems to be doing okay). Finally, The Pirate Bay has made in painfully obvious, at every opportunity, that they don’t find these rules to be “good rules”. From their perspective, there is no reason to follow them.

Now which of those levels best apply to the copyright-holders?

I am loathe to use the G word, but domestic anger over The Pirate Bay is one of the consequences of Globalization. The same lack of international law that allows corporations to lower costs by avoiding minimum wage, skirting environmental law or criminal negligence is playing out in the other direction by allowing those pesky Swedes to circumvent our enlightened copyright laws.

1. Numbers are tangible. The primitive brain that you pretend to have evolved beyond still affects a lot of your decision-making. Marketers know this and exploit it. There is an animalistic comfort in the easiness of lists; they suggest objects to be picked up, grasped, and easily compared. Whether it’s horsepower and miles per gallon or gigahertz and megabytes, one number is obviously higher or lower than another. We can rest assured that no one is out to fool us with complex arguments, because the values of the numbers are irrefutable.
2. There is an expectation of legitimate content. With so many posts that are merely ramblings on about one’s day, how work is going, or particular political preferences, there is a suggestion that a list of specific items contains information worth arranging. A headline like “Anarchism is Awesome” could be emotional reactions from a 13-year old reading Emma Goldman for the first time is, but “7 Awesome Moments in Anarchism” presents an expectation that anarchism may actually be talked about in discrete and concrete ways.
3. Scannability. Unlike books that require “reading”, an archaic and inefficient tradition still practiced by some Luddites and most of the Midwest, on the internet we scan pages by moving our eyes very quickly near the words. All kidding aside, it’s true that we really don’t read on the web, our eye-pattern tends to look like a capital “F”. We jump from item to item, treating paragraphs as lists of ideas, not a slowly unfolding argument. In this way, lists align with our natural tendency, a recipe for success.
4. Lists are easy to remember. Moses knew this when he started calling the rules God unloaded unto him the “Ten Commandments”. His contemporary Buddha did the same, whittling life down to Four Noble Truths, an Eightfold Path, etc. Both did so in order for their followers to remember the teachings without having a Treo handy. The number of items in a list present a target of things to remember (how many food groups?) and can remind you of what you’re missing. No one gives up after 7 reindeer, because they’re obviously forgetting Blitzen. Bonus points if your list can be converted to an acronym, like HOMES for the Great Lakes or ABMNNNNNOPQSY for the Canadian Provinces and Territories.
5. What’s number five going to be? Will it be what you longingly hope or what you secretly dread? Lists are dramatic by nature. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just like a story. Your brain magically, and mostly subconsciously, transforms the slowly marching items into exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. As you read through the 13 horror movies, your brain is thinking, “Will ‘Jacob’s Ladder‘ be on it?” or, perusing the 10 best Mac apps, you desperately wish to resolve the question, “Has this guy heard of Quicksilver?” By the end of the list, you are rewarded. Countdowns in particular leverage this effect.

Now you see that there’s a perfectly reasonable and largely neurological reason that you like clicking on articles with titles like “the top 10 blankity-blanks” or “7 secrets about blankity-blank”. Don’t beat yourself up about it.

The story begins with an anonymous article posted to IndyBay, an independent online news source. Here’s the long and short of it:

Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong.

I definitely have an axe to grind with the PR industry in general, so this article sucked me right in. Could our vision of online democratic utopia truly be so easily torn asunder by this “Black PR” strategy? Is the emerging global community just the latest playground for powermongers to co-opt and exploit?

But I was quickly reminded that the internet is a fundamentally more diverse and thus more healthy media environment than newspaper or television. The very first comment to the article was:

I’m checking to see if this is for real.

Craig

By the time the article from IndyBay got to Digg, it was already being sorted out. Writes one commenter:

I just googled Tomkins and Scott and found nothing (except this post). One might attribute this to the fact that the company is “underground” because it does “black PR,” but the wording of this post is very strange. It really sounds like a 12 year old trying to sound like a 30 year old.

Which was followed shortly afterward by:

I don’t know about the rest of Diggers, but I don’t like to go off half-cocked. Dugg nonetheless for a cool conspiracy theory. Also marked as possibly inaccurate. Let’s see some proof.

And finally:

I sure wish someone would have asked me, I asked the guy, and he admitted it’s a hoax.

There are people doing really nasty PR stuff, and netvocates and also fls-dci have been accused of very ugly stuff. Check out the investigative journalists at patriotproject.com, look up their work on swiftboaters.

Craig

One way to look at the whole situation is that an untrue story like the original post would never have been published in traditional media. Another is that the article itself was describing how easy it is to fool the new media. But at the end of the day, community feedback took a dishonest article about a dishonest practice and managed to uncover the truth of the situation (i.e. while this particular instance was a hoax, it is describing a real threat). That feedback simply doesn’t exist in traditional media. Which is why we get things like half of America believing that Iraq had WMDs and bad math on the cover of Business Week.

In essence what we’ve seen are sources of increasingly less authority all safeguarding the validity of whatever they exist in contrast to. Craigslist keeps watch on mainstream media, IndyBay keeps watch on Craigslist, Digg keeps watch on IndyBay, and the commenters keep watch on Digg. The truth seems to be a recursive function.