There are some interesting news about the situation of the bittorrent-tracker The Pirate Bay.

It seems to me that this case can turn into a publicity desaster for the MPAA and the swedish anti piracy organizations. gulli has a longer article in german.

Chaosradio has a long podcast-interview with one of the TPB guys (english), which also turns out some interesting things, for example the question why they took the dna from the arrested activists (for possible copyright violations through the internet, you surely need the dna).

Several organizations are calling for demonstrations today in sweden, as you can read on Piratbyråns temporary website.

I very much like the actions of those swedish groups, I think more people should act like them. I assume that a vast majority of the people in some way do filesharing of copyrighted content, but just a small minority of them fights for their right to do so.

Update, Saturday 11h: They are back online.

planet is a famous python software to combine the feeds of various blogs (or other feed-sources) to one website. It's used by various free software projects, organizations etc.

While thinking about creating a planet karlsruhe, I thought about possible licensing/copyright problems, in theory you would have to ask everyone you aggregate. As there are many blogs using free or semi-free licenses like FDL or Creative Commons that at least allow re-distributing unchanged content if you stick with the license, adding license-data would make it perfectly legal to add those feeds without asking.

planet is already flexible enough to do this, as you can just add additional variables. Change the config.ini to something like this:

[http://www.hboeck.de/feeds/atom.xml]
name = Hanno Böck
license_name = Creative Commons by-sa
license_link = http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Add some Code to the template:

<TMPL_IF channel_license_name>
<TMPL_IF channel_license_link><a href="<TMPL_VAR channel_license_link ESCAPE="HTML">"></TMPL_IF>
<TMPL_VAR channel_license_name ESCAPE="HTML">
<TMPL_IF channel_license_link></a></TMPL_IF>
</TMPL_IF>

And you're done.

Der Bittorrent-Tracker The Pirate Bay bekam gestern Besuch von den Freunden und Helfern in grün.

Pikant daran: The Pirate Bay ist nicht nur eine »gewöhnliche« Filesharing-Site, sondern eng verbunden mit der schwedischen Gruppe Piratbyrån, die politisch mit Protestaktionen und Berichten gegen Copyrights und Patente arbeitet. Deren Server, welcher wohl in den gleichen Räumen stand, wurde nebenbei gleich mit beschlagnahmt.

Die Aktion gegen Pirate Bay ist somit weit mehr als ein Schlag gegen die »Raubkopierer« und Warez-Szene. Es ist ein Angriff auf die politische Arbeit einer Gruppe, die frech und unverhohlen ihre politische Arbeit mit direkter Unterstützung für Filesharing-Aktivitäten verband.

Gulli weiss mehr. Der Onlineshop von PirateBay und Piratbyrån ist weiterhin online. Da kann man sich die schicken Logos runterladen und Merchandising-Material bestellen.