PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE
Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer
We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.
Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".
Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.
The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.
Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.
Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.
What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.