Rebel of the Week: Peter Sunde
December 8th, 2010Today’s fight for liberty is not your grandparent’s battle. Now you can be a hero without crossing the Delaware River to sneak attack Hessians during Christmas Eve or marching in the street and having fire hoses turned upon you. In 2010 one is incalculably more valuable using asymmetric information warfare against those who are doing evil. Merely exposing the dastardly deeds that rulers, politicians and bureaucrats do in the name of their citizens and subjects is often enough to get average people to see the evil in front of them and (hopefully) reject it. As the saying goes, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
This is precisely why the cloud of scandals constantly surrounding Wikileaks are invaluable. The freshly arrested Julian Assange has already been a Rebel of the Week for Silver Circle Underground, and he absolutely deserves it, but this week we celebrate freedom fighter Peter Sunde.
PayPal has recently refused to allow users to funnel any more contributions to Wikileaks due to alleged violation of the terms of service. Fortunately, Sunde is still allowing donations to the whistle blowing site through his micro-payments tool, Flattr, which provides the service of allowing users to reward content providers with small donations for their work in a convenient manner.
Peter Sunde is already quite a vulnerable target and is facing trial in his home country of Sweden for “assisting [others in] copyright infringement” through his torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. He and his colleagues were each sentenced to a year in prison and $905,000 in damages, but they are currently receiving a retrial, with the possibility of the trial going to the Swedish Supreme Court.
He and his colleagues repeated challenges and outright taunts to those perpetuating the anti-market intellectual property regime are courageous and downright snarky. They frequently receive formal legal threats from American media companies under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), to which the responses are often along these snide lines:
We are well aware of the fact that The Pirate Bay falls outside the scope of the DMCA –
after all, the DMCA is a US-specific legislation, and TPB is hosted in the land of vikings, reindeers, Aurora Borealis and cute blonde girls.
Please don’t sue us right now, our lawyer is passed out in an alley from too much moonshine, so please at least wait until he’s found and doesn’t have a huge hangover…
And:
It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ……. morons, and that you should
please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
For his humorous activism, sticking to his principles despite massive legal scrutiny and placing himself in undoubtedly more political danger by helping Julian Assange and Wikileaks in their time of need, Peter Sunde is a standout hero for the free flow of information and an open society.
We wish you the best of luck, Peter & Company, in fighting your legal battles. How grateful we are for the heroism for which you are receiving our honor of Rebel of the Week.
