Piratbyrån

» see piratbyran.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Piratbyrån set itself up on 1 August 2003 as a Swedish think tank with one argument to make: that copying is not theft, and that the file-sharing panic was a political question rather than a criminal one. It was not a service and it hosted nothing you could download. It was people writing in public and building things that made the argument harder to wave off.

One of those things was The Pirate Bay. Members started it the same year as a Swedish-language BitTorrent tracker, and within about a year it had been handed off to run on its own. The two stayed tangled together in the public mind and in police paperwork for the rest of the decade, which is how an organization that never ran a tracker ended up losing its servers to a copyright raid.

I knew the ship with the cassette-tape sail. Anyone on a Turkish connection in 2005 knew that logo. What I did not know, and did not find out for years afterward, was that the tracker had a parent, and that the parent was an argument rather than a business.

~ the chronicle ~

~ kopimi ~

Ibi Kopimi Botani drew the kopimi mark in January 2005. Two stacked pyramid shapes, meant to be read as the inverse of the little c in a circle: not a reservation of rights but a request, please copy me. From June 2005 it sat on The Pirate Bay's front page. Botani took the word into his own name and kept it there.

It worked as design because it flipped a legal notice into an invitation without needing a paragraph underneath to explain itself. People put it on records and on their own sites.

~ the raid ~

On 31 May 2006 Swedish police raided a Stockholm data center and carried out servers belonging to The Pirate Bay and to Piratbyrån together. The stated target was the tracker. Piratbyrån's own site, which held essays rather than torrents, went down alongside it.

The raid did the opposite of what it was for. The Pirate Bay was back inside three days and the Swedish Pirate Party's membership climbed hard enough that it stopped reading as a joke. Over the next three years Piratbyrån spent less time on legal argument and more on staging things: it burned the unsold copies of its own anthology, Copy Me, on Walpurgis Night in 2007, and it turned up at the 2009 Venice Biennale as the Embassy of Piracy while the Pirate Bay trial was running back in Stockholm.

~ the two words ~

Ibi Kopimi Botani died in June 2010. On 22 June the rest of the group closed the organization down, and the site was replaced with three words: Stängt för eftertanke. Closed for reflection.

Nobody ever went back to reopen it, and there was never a wind-down notice underneath. By then the argument had left the building on its own. Sweden had sent a Pirate Party member to the European Parliament and the file-sharing question had moved out of a Stockholm subculture and into ordinary politics. piratbyran.org answers today with an empty page and nothing on it at all, which is a quieter ending than the one they wrote for themselves.

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