!=

Word on the street is that the Pirate Bay 3 have left the building, for any value of building where building = Sweden.

The TPB trial is a lose–lose proposition: lose the trial or win and provoke a furious political backlash—of the kind that might, say, lead them to find a safer harbor. Where?

Culture-war vets from the late ’80s and early ’90s in the US may remember what an awesome deal it was for culture at large when rightists smearjacked All Things Unconservative with pottymouth self-indulgent attention-seekers like Andres Serrano and Karen Finley. Making the PB3 into the heroes of a WiReDish here-comes-the-flood narrative (e.g., <cough>Steal This Film</cough>) works well until someone pulls the plug and the flood waters start to recede. At which point, the scum becomes a bit harder to ignore.

The Wikipedia article on Carl Lundström, the Pirate Bay’s awfully radically right-wing sugardaddy (1, 2, 3, 4),

may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted. (March 2009)

That would be Wikipedia’s version of: Move along—nothing to see here. Nor would it be “generally notable” if it turned out that Pim Fortuyn or Geert Wilders had funded Hacktic, or if Jörg Haider was the moneyman been behind Public Netbase.

On Steal This Film, Keith Hart:

Jamie King, who posted a link to the list [...] shows that money matters more to the makers of the film than would appear to be the case from its content. The above post is almost all about money. How much it matters is revealed by the failure of the ‘business model’ for Part 1 of the movie and by the fact that Paypal has a virtual monopoly of small cash transfers on the internet.

Unrevealed is the initial source of funding for STFx2, before swarms of Paypalistas amortized it.

The formerly anonymous director of STFx2 seems to be coming out. He’s mystified why he wasn’t outed in a more advantageous way:

But what is this with me having to find out via some (obviously discerning) guy’s blog that our film is an a major international film festival? Hello?

It’s a bit like Odysseus grousing that Polyphemos didn’t give him credit for being so clever.