Well, the term "pirate culture" is of course quite broad. I think that this news will be utilized by all sides toward different ends. The more pro-piracy parties in the Netherlands and Sweden will use this to justify their conviction that the big media corporations are nothing more than a cartel of swindling colluding suits whose last concern is what the market wants. This kind of cutthroat ethic pervades both sides of the battle, as the pirates by and large typically refuse to fight "within the system," and so big media responds by using likewise "unorthodox" methods. I think that stateside, with the lobbying domination of the RIAA and the MPAA, this news will be either wholly downplayed or spun to make the pirates look like evil hackers pilfering internal documents. They'd then look like anti-American (as they are anti-collusive capitalism), and hopefully that would hurt their image sufficiently that it would hinder sympathy for them here. I think it's a wonderful thing sociologically that the e-mails are now in the wild, although the use of them for study surely involves tricky, if not insurmountable, ethical complications. I'm reminded of when AOL inadvertently posted all those user searches on public servers. Within hours the whole package was on all the major torrent sites. And with that kind of redundant backup system, I don't think the data will be "disappearing" anytime soon! The most important aspect to me of this event is that it demonstrates how fundamentally and systemically different peer-to-peer transactions are, and the threat--as well as, certainly, the benefits--to the business models of relatively traditional corporations. I don't at all think this will give such corporation pause in pursuing nasty methods to root out the pirates, though. It'll just motivate them to adopt even more of a black-ops atmosphere, and try to stay ahead of the pirates around the world. Conor Shira Chess wrote:
Has anyone heard about this yet? Any thoughts on how this is going to affect pirate culture...?
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-emails-leaked-070915/ "When TorrentFreak reported that Media Defender (MD) was behind the video site MiiVi, they cast doubt on us. Now, in what is surely the biggest BitTorrent leak ever, nearly 700mb of MD's emails have gone public."
"Just about every aspect of the company's operations on every file sharing network is revealed in the emails, including their fake eDonkey server and Soulseek activities, not to mention payroll issues and discussions about what to eat for lunch."
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/