Never Going Offline

The situation was familiar to anyone who wasn’t watching television on a schedule set by someone else: a show had been running in the US for a full season already and the networks in Europe hadn’t bought it yet. The album everyone was talking about wasn’t available in your corner of the world. Torrents weren’t a lifestyle choice so much as the only working pipe. You used them the way you used a library—out of necessity, with mild guilt, grateful they existed.

The Pirate Bay went to trial in Sweden in February 2009. The Swedes weren’t exactly burning to prosecute their own pirates, but the music and film industry had been sitting on their necks for years and wanted a verdict that would set precedent—something that would redefine copyright enforcement and fundamentally limit what it means to share a file with another person.

The Pirate Bay announced in advance, with their characteristic straight face, that whatever the court decided, the site wouldn’t go dark. That posture was either principled or delusional depending on your mood, but you had to admire the commitment. The broader picture didn’t change much either way: the industry kept hunting, and the internet kept finding new pipes. After Napster, after early YouTube, after The Pirate Bay, there was always another platform waiting. The irony is that the only thing that actually slowed piracy down was when legal services finally got convenient enough to bother with. That took another decade.