Piratbyran
Piratbyrån = The Pirate Association or Bureau of Piracy in Sweden
Advocates of free cultures based on the Grey Commons, opponents of copyright.
Description
Citation from Rasmus Fleischer at http://copyriot.blogspot.com/2006/06/piratbyrans-speech-at-reboot.html
"Piratbyrån (The Pirate Association or Bureau of Piracy) in Sweden and Piratgruppen (The Pirate Group) in Denmark are sister organizations that tries to develop and deepen the questions about intellectual property and file sharing, through discussions, events, media appearances, publishing, lectures; developing and deepening
Piratbyrån was born in late summer 2003, emerging out partly from an integrated internet radio broadcast community and partly from IRC channels populated by the Swedish hacker community and demo-sceners. Piratbyrån was initiated to support the free copying of culture and has today evolved into a think-thank, running a community and an information site in Swedish with news, forums, articles, guides and a shop and has to date over 60000 members.
But two days ago, it was closed down by the Swedish police seizing the servers, that stood in the same server hall as The Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bittorrent tracker. It was started by Piratbyrån in november 2003 but grew faster than anyone could imagine, therefore it was naturl to branch it off and today, The Pirate Bay is a fully independent entity, but in a very friendly relation to Piratbyrån."
(http://copyriot.blogspot.com/2006/06/piratbyrans-speech-at-reboot.html)
Discussion
Filesharing is a horizontal activity involving uploading as well as downloading
"Most file-sharers use bittorrent, where every downloader is also an uploader, and thus were probably in a formal sense criminals also before this law, that doesn't really seem to have changed anything. It is of big importance not to accept this terminology where âdownloadingâ? appears as some kind of activity completely separate from the uploading. We instead insist on talking about file-sharing as an horizontal activity. Just like the activity of breathing includes both taking in air in the body and letting it out, filesharing has the same symmetry between up and down. Taking them apart, if even only through language, can only fill the purpose of replacing open exchange with centralized control. Talking about "downloading" obscures the fact that horizontal P2P-communication is essentialy different from vertical mass-distribution. It is not the same "content" taking different paths to the "consumer". It is about different archives and different architectures." (http://copyriot.blogspot.com/2006/06/piratbyrans-speech-at-reboot.html)