Geekery

Geek God: Gottfrid Svartholm

Posted on 04. Aug, 2009 by Jake in Geek God

His name may mean nothing to you. Hell, chances are you probably can barely pronounce it without sounding vaguely silly if you’re the average South African bloke. But Gottfrid Svartholm (whether you call him a hero, a villain, or just plain “Gott”)  is going to have a lasting impact on the way we use the internet.

Svartholm is a 24-year old Swedish computer genius and the co-founder of an ISP.

He’s a libertarian and has been called a ‘boy genius’ by no less than Vanity Fair. He’s also, technically speaking, a criminal who has been sentenced to a year in prison.

Juicy story….read on!

In 2003, Piratbyrån (a Swedish group concerned with ‘liberating’ intellectual property) established a file-sharing website called The Pirate Bay. The site had evolved into its own entity when, in May 2006, Swedish police raided the Pirate Bay offices.

Many believe that the police were acting under political pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) – similar to RIAA, the body responsible for upholding the intellectual property rights of musicians in the States – and that Pirate Bay had angered too many powerful industry players. If you’re picturing Mafioso and MacCarthy era politicians, then you’re probably a hacker-minded geek too.

It’s no secret that piracy thrives on the amorphous entity that is the internet, but the Pirate Bay offices were a tangible locus, a headquarters of file sharing, and the industry was only going to let this slide for so long.

Svartholm and his associates, Fredrik Neij and Mikael Viborg, were taken in for questioning and the site was closed down. Hundreds of young Swedes, mobilised by liberal youth groups, demonstrated against the action. They were protesting against the raid itself and in favour of the principles of freeing the world’s information, ostensibly the principle on which the Internet was founded. Or maybe they just wanted to ensure an uninterrupted supply of free movies, pop music and pornography. Hey, who can say?

In January 2008, Svartholm, Neij, computer expert Peter Sunde, and businessman Carl Lundström were charged with abetting the infringement of copyright laws. The following trial became a sensation in the online community.

One of the more amusing legal strategies was the counsel’s ‘King Kong defence’.
This goes to the heart of the issue: whether Svartholm and his collaborators are responsible for piracy themselves or whether they are merely an innocent third party, facilitating free action among internet users.

He argued that to be liable, the web administrators must have been personally involved in users’ activities – he must ‘initiate the transfer’. So if someone, say a surfer with the username ‘King Kong’ downloads a Hollywood movie, “the prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia”.

Unfortunately, the court was underwhelmed by this argument and in April 2009 the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison, as well as being heavily fined.

Many had expected a guilty verdict, but the strength of the sentence was surprising.
The verdict is currently under appeal.

Whether or not you believe the Swedish authorities were acting under pressure from US industry, it’s clear that the harsh steps taken against Pirate Bay were intended as a deterrent to others operating similar services.

Will it work? In the short term, many similar file-sharing sites have chosen to close rather than risk being penalised.

But the case has raised the profile of copyright freedom campaigners and, as an aside, been a clear demonstration of the power of industry – of special interest groups – and the relative powerlessness of the consumer.

So, our question: Is Svartholm really a Geek God?
Even if you believe that information should be free and available to all, as I strongly do, the Pirate Bay crew were still breaking the law. More importantly, it seems unfair – and against the very principles of the Piratbyrån – that a small elite should profit from their users’ file-sharing.

But Svartholm is a different kind of hero. In many ways, he’s just another cocky computer nerd. But the heavy hand of the Swedish courts have turned him into a symbol of the struggle to define the internet.

Tags: copyright, file sharing, Geek God, geekery, gottfrid svartholm, illegal, ISP, piracy, the pirate bay