Pirate Blog

Swedish law and Web 2.0. What do the two have to do with each other? Meet The Pirate Bay - everything you ever wanted in and feared about online peer to peer services. I was introduced to this Sweden-based "torrent-tracker" by my friend and blogger Brandon Wiley during a ACTLab New Media Talk Series as the ultimate online piracy paradise.

According to Wired magazine, a Pirate Bay operator stated "All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change."

Backed by lax Swedish copyright laws, The Pirate Bay utilizes peer to peer technology to provide a searchable directory of downloadable music, movies, games and software via torrents. Today's Top 100 torrents on The Pirate Bay include episodes from South Park and Battlestar Galactica, the movies No Country For Old Men and Cloverfield, and the game Assassin's Creed.

But The Pirate Bay's philosophies on the freedom of information exchange are not limited to peer to peer file sharing. This month TPB unveiled it's own uncensored blogging service, Baywords.

According to the site itself, TPB will defend any blog posts a user decides to make, even using content usually barred from US-based blog services... "As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog."

OK, I'm not sure how awesome that actually is. I guess it would depend on what Sweden’s “hate speech” legislation bars...