dreadedmonkeygod . net

Torrentfreak reports that Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months home detention for his work on BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.

On the one hand, I find it outrageous that working on a BitTorrent tracker site warrents jail time. Even if the convication is to be taken at face value, he was helping people fine pirated copies of movies and music.

But BitTorrent is not about pirated movies and music. It's useful for that, sure. But that's not why it was built, or why it's important. It is primarily meant to distribute legal, useful, important material like music by independent artists trying to get noticed, student films, videos of technical talks, and other large files created by people with comparatively low bandwidth resources. This is a huge, important step in the evolution of media. Without a tool like BitTorrent to move large files between "common netizens", video and music will only be available from entities with a financial interest in producing them. Regular Joes with their guitars will have to find another way to get heard.

And before you ask: I think it's important that everyone can put their little creations on the net. Because here in the U.S., it might just be another guy strumming out Pink Floyd covers, but in Tibet, in Darfur, in Bosnia and Venezuela and Sudan, public communication free of corporate or government control is pretty damn important. Democratizing the media means more than just YouTube.

Criminalizing a piece of software that has legitimate, important uses is a bad idea.

On the other hand, I hope this will get the geek community to realize that up until now, we've offered little in the way of real political force, and that if we want the future we see in our minds' eyes, we need to fight for it now, and fight on the terms of contemporary political culture. It won't come to us. Screaming "BETAMAX!" at the top of your lungs isn't going to cut it. It never did.