!=

Rasmus Fleischer writes: “‘The Pirate Bay’ must be defined as an assemblage.” He prexplains:

We are used to imagine The Pirate Bay as a legendary entity fighting an epic battle, on behalf of the millions of file-sharers. However, it is not exactly a legendary entity that is being sold. It is something different. So what is about to be sold?

“The Pirate Bay” is today, among other things:

• A domain name
• A web site
• An ad selling business
• A blog
• The world’s largest bittorrent tracker
• A clothing store
• Three persons
• A swarm
• A symbol

And concludes:

File-sharing was never about leaning behind and letting other people do the work. The act of selling “The Pirate Bay” (which really means selling some of the components in a larger assemblage) could work as a wake-up call. Ideally, the anger of some users will transform into action, so that more open bittorrent indexing website, maybe even trackers, will be set up. That would mean that The Pirate Bay, finally and paradoxically, reaches its goal, which is to be copied. The Pirate Bay never asked to be the sole representatives of file-sharing. When large parts of the world’s internet traffic depends on whether Fredrik is too drunk to fix a server error, a radical diversification is needed to maintaing the power of P2P file-sharing. Dissolving the centered subject, abandoning a trademark to multiply what it stands for. That’s the implicit schizo-politics of The Pirate Bay’s recent move.

Schizo-revenues. Schizo-windfall.

But as we noted (quoting WiReD) on 20 Feb ’09:

[Fredrik] Neij appeared awkward in court as he struggled to explain the community nature of Pirate Bay to a prosecutor who seemed unfamiliar with non-hierarchical organization. The prosecutor became visibly frustrated when he tried to get Neij to identify the kingpin who is ultimately responsible for Pirate Bay and the text and graphics on the site. Neij explained that an extended group of people have privileges on the server, and contribute haphazardly as they see fit. The prosecutor seemed not to grasp the concept. “But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic,” he protested. “No,” Neij answered.

So for prosecutors TPB is headless, whereas for users it’s bottomless — unless Fredrik’s too drunk, in which case all bets are off.

See also: “Walk^w tiptoe the plank,” “TPB4, TPB3, TPB2, TPB1.”