Erisian insight

Where do we draw the line? A question the entirety of humanity has dealt with, on a daily basis, for pretty much the entirety of our existence. And, while I'm not quite presumptuous enough to think I can give a solid answer to this immortal question, I am egotistical enough to think you'll want my opinion.

More precisely on this week's little moral chestnut, the publication of the autopsy photos of murdered children on the Piratebay.  Notice that that's ON, not BY, a highly important distinction to make. While a lot can be said about the Piratebay's refusal to remove the pictures, it's offhand dismissal of the children's father request for said removal and their almost stoic approach to the situation, they can not be blamed for putting the pictures up there in the first place. The Piratebay simply doesn't work like that, and it seems a common misconception in the media that it does. I can't personally help but wonder if the ‘traditional' media isn't willingly perpetuating this myth simply to add more fuel to the controversial fire, because we all know controversy sells papers.  Or maybe I'm just being cynical, but I honestly can't decide which is worse: stubborn stupidity or intentional ignorance.

What the piratebay does is merely facilitating the spread of information. It's little more then a search engine, and to hold it accountable for what it searches for is simply ludicrous. After all, I can find violent bondage porn through Google, yet anybody trying to accuse them of spreading such questionable material would be ridiculed for being an utter and total moron. Yet turn those accusations against the Piratebay and suddenly you're a veritable prophet of righteousness, despite little difference in how they operate, with the exception that the piratebay is a far more specialized engine.  Funny how people rally to call for censorship of the Piratebay, yet scream at the top of their lungs at the thought of Google bowing to the Chinese.

So, let's get down to the point: is the Piratebay's refusal to remove the pictures justifiable, ethically speaking?

I'd say yes. Piratebay has a clear cut user policy that states that they will not remove any material that isn't clearly intended to harm or damage the recipient, such as computer viruses and worms, and violating this policy would undermine the free spread of information that the Piratebay so persistently advocates. As vehement protestors against censorship in all forms, Piratebay and it's ‘crew' have made an ethical statement that, if anything, only goes to show that they are willing to stand by their principles even when those principles force them to make hard choices, despite heavy external pressure.

Of course vehement sticking to your principals isn't necessarily a good thing, and you could easily turn my argument around and say that the Piratebay is simply hiding behind its policy to avoid having to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable material. One could certainly view their stance as morally objectionable, as this weeks maelstrom has proven, and I too find myself torn. Like the Piratebay, I too stand by strict principals of unabridged freedom, perhaps even more strongly thanks to my roots in anarchism, open source culture and Discordianism. I too, on principal, would argue that such information should be made available to the public on grounds of freedom and uncensored information.

 Yet I am not a machine governed purely by my preprogrammed responses, and I can't help but feel an empathic pang of sympathy toward the father, who has to endure the horrible faith of having the pictures of his dead children spread across the internet. Perhaps even worse, I can't help but wonder how I would feel about the idea of pictures of MY dead, autopsied body being spread unto the internet. The thought is, to say the least, uncomfortable and I can't say that the idea makes me feel anything but a muted sense of disgust.

I do not feel that I can, with certainty, say what I would do if put in a similar position. I certainly don't envy the guys at the Piratebay and the no doubt unpleasant decision they've had to make, but that doesn't stop me from feeling disappointment and anger toward the mortal outrage that the media has gone into. There is certainly plenty of room for true moral debate concerning this, but what we've gotten from the so called ‘old media' is little more then dirt slinging and a sort of mob mentality I thought we abandoned after the Salem witch burnings.

The pictures are public space, meaning that they are, or at least were, freely available to anybody who could and would stroll into a suitable public office and ask for them. Most of the older media seems to take a sort of moral highground to this, decrying the Piratebay for publishing the pictures when they had the moral fiber to stand down, but this to me reeks of a severe misunderstanding of the nature of the medium. Putting the pictures up during the eight o' clock news is one thing, where the viewer has no choice but to either watch or turn the channel, and might not be prepared for what he is about to see. The Piratebay, on the other hand, operates far more slowly, where the viewer has to make the conscious, informed decision to download the pictures, an act that serves to protect them from seeing something they don't want to see. You can't accuse the Piratebay of forcing you to watch the pictures, least not if you're intending to be truthful, and in the end they're doing little but saving you the walk down to the prosecutors' office and the hassle of filling out some forms.

Of course, as doing something becomes easier people are more likely to do it, and whether or not the Piratebay is right in facilitating the spread of this particular tidbit of information is, like all questions, one with many answers. Personally I would defend their choice, but I'm more then aware that my opinion is of little weight in this case.