Allow me to rant for a moment. I love movies. Seriously. Passionately. I watch five per week, and routinely quote lines as part of daily dialog with others. The Academy Awards is a holiday at my house. But I HATE the movie industry. Just as seriously, and just as passionately. The last time I was in a movie theater, I walked out ready to vomit in disgust at the experience. At $5 to park, $16 for two tickets, and another $15 for greasy, sugary refreshments, I was out $36 and I hadn’t even found a flippin’ seat yet. I remember sitting down in what passes as stadium-seating in Milwaukee, hoping the texting tweens in front of us were going to shut the hell up before the movie started. As the lights dimmed, the familiar feeling of trailer-anticipation washed over me. And it was promptly ruined by the commercials. Yes, commercials. Even though I had PAID for tickets, I was still subjected to inane advertisements for Pepsi, Aquafina, and Nissan. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I experienced the final insult a few moments later. It took the form of a 60-second plea from some Key Grip about how I was putting him and his family into the streets by downloading movies without paying for them. He referred to downloaders as pirates and said they were stealing the fruit of his labor. Pirates?! Stealing?! THIS is why I hate the industry. They blow a cool $200 million dollars on a movie with Superman doing the SAME THING he did 25 years ago, turn record revenues from this cinematic turd, and then trot out the hard-working everyman Mr. Key Grip to call me a pirate and a thief.

First of all, downloading and copying are NOT THE SAME AS STEALING. As much as the industry wants to tie in the Ten Commandments, theft involves one party depriving another party of their property. Downloading and copying does not deprive anyone of anything. Are downloading and copying illegal? Now that’s another question entirely. Copyright laws differ from country to country, and unfortunately, those of the United States are rather draconian. The short answer is sometimes it’s legal, and sometimes it ain’t.

Secondly, not all pirates are created equal. There are commercial pirates and there are cultural pirates. The commercial pirates are business people. They make money by copying and burning newly released movies onto DVD’s and selling them to people all over the world (China, Russia, Brazil and India are particularly large markets). However, the cultural pirates are a different story. Remember when you were in high school and you borrowed a couple of buddies’ tapes so you could make a mix-tape for your girlfriend? (A moment of silence, if you please, for the venerable mix-tape). This type of exchange is what today’s cultural pirates passionately believe in, while industry advocates would rather see you in prison for such an offense. As the internet has evolved, consequently becoming more restricted and regulated, the cultural pirates have attracted more and more scrutiny. The first blow to the community came with the Napster decision in 2001. In recent years, with the RIAA taking point, the hunt to “smoke out” the file-sharers has reached a crescendo with sites being shutdown every few months, and individual song-swappers being sued. But far from being crushed, The Scene (as it’s colloquially referred to) has simply moved underground. As the various darknets emerged, The Scene naturally found refuge there, and it is thriving.

To understand the differences between the cultural pirate community, and the commercial pirates, a basic understanding of The Scene is necessary. Thankfully, the good people over at The Scene Exposed seem more than happy to supply extensive details. (It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in this stuff.) Individuals dedicate hours of their lives every day to capture, encode, package and distribute music, TV shows, and movies without so much as a dime changing hands. As my wife said when I was explaining this to her one night, “That’s what I call a labor of love.” Why do they do it? The inner drive of The Scene is remarkably similar to that of the Tagging and B-Boy scene in 1980’s New York. Artistic freedom, competition, one-upsmanship, and a passion for self-expression are the core concepts at work here.

As leechers at the bottom of The Scene pyramid, I would liken us to B-Boy spectators. We enjoy watching the artists work their magic. To appreciate the works produced by The Scene, there are many open and accessible gateways. Bittorrent is the “new hotness” right now. It is true peer-to-peer with no central servers a la Napster. Public trackers include Mininova, Torrentspy, and BT-Chat, but as industry crackdowns have increased, you’re more like to get poor quality copies or industry planted bogus material from these sources. The real action is happening on the darknet websites. These sites connect to private bittorrent trackers and the quality is consistent. Below are a few of these sites. I assure you they won’t pop-up on a random Google search for bittorrent trackers:

Movie X

BitNation

TV Torrents

Cinematik

Although I love the darknet players, the real heroes of The Scene are loud and proud. They have even turned the term their enemies used against them into a source of pride.

The Pirate Bay does what everyone else wants to do. They look the Industry and the Government in the eye and give them the finger in public and in broad daylight. And if they didn’t, people might start to forget. They might forget how to protest, how to buck the system, and how to get pissed off! And they might start accepting the restrictions imposed on them. Today it’s sharing a video, but tomorrow it could be your right to privacy or free speech. American copyright law makes no sense in the internet age. Do we continue to let corporate interests legislate our freedoms as they did with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1999? Or do we tell the entertainment industry that suing their own customers is not the answer?

Check out the documentary below titled “Good Copy Bad Copy” on the current state of copyright law. VERY eye-opening, and it’s got some Pirate Bay interviews!  You may need to visit the link to view the higher resolution of the video once the subtitles start becoming important.