Peter Sunde is co-founder of The Pirate Bay and Flattr. He is also currently charged with assisting copyright infringement in Sweden. So, who better to interview him than a lawyer! We asked Rick Shera to interview Peter for us. This is the result.

Rick: You are one of the four founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB), bitTorrent site. How did that come about?

Peter: Actually three, not four — the fourth is the owner of the ISP that TPB used for a while, and since he’s considered a rich asshole (both rich and an asshole) the prosecutor wanted him in on the terms of him helping with helping.

It’s a long story 🙂

Anyhow, for me it was many years ago that I noticed a Swedish organisation called Piratbyrån — “the bureau for piracy” — that was saying that we shouldn’t just swallow the things that came from Antipiratbyrån — “the bureau against piracy” — which was published in the news all the time. Piratbyrån was started to shift the focus from moral “right or wrong” to what actually happens when the internet kills off the old models. I was very intrigued and joined them. There was a discussion right then about the new technology — bittorrent — and that there was no Scandinavian place for people. So TPB was started, and the rest is history!

Rick: For those not up to speed with how bitTorrent and the p2p protocol in general operates, can you give a brief overview of how TPB works

Peter: TPB is a seach engine! Not much more, really. TPB helps people find works that other people have told TPB about. When you want to download, you get a small file containing metadata (a .torrent file) which says where to find people that have the actual data, and what to look for. People then share the data between each other. Bittorrent is very effective in the way that you download small segments of the data from everyone that has parts of it. Instead of downloading from 1 place, you can download from thousands of places at the same time. And also, even though you don’t have all of the data yourself, the bits you have can be shared. It’s very effective in terms of speed and distribution.

Rick: TPB has become the poster child for digital anti-copyright activism — what is your copyright philosophy?

Peter: That it’s not at all aligned to peoples usage or believes. Everything was turned upside-down with the digitalisation and decentralisation of the internet, and the only organisations that still benefit from the old model are the ones that are also fighting it with 1B USD per year (own figures). All independent research shows that with file sharing, artists makes more money than ever before. I think that research and reality should be used when one creates laws, not who has the biggest wallet. It becomes a classic fight of the classes for me, and hence I’m interested.

Rick: How can business models and copyright be adapted to cope with a global internet — the best copying engine ever invented and one that does not respect jurisdictional boundaries?

Peter: By making new tools to help financing work, and giving up certain models that will not fit in todays world. You can’t close your eyes to facts really. People have no problem with the money side of content, as long as it’s easy. Today you don’t read one newspaper, you read all of them. If you would actually pay for all of them, the set amount that they all wanted, you’d stop reading all of them. Instead, find a method that is fitting for how people consume and participate in it.

Rick: Your activism with TPB has obviously gotten under the skin of the regulators and that has seen you and your TPB co-founders charged with assisting copyright infringement in Sweden. What stage is the case at and why do you think it was brought?

Peter: We’re waiting for the second appeal, which is at the supreme court of Sweden. After that, there might also be the European Union court, since the case is so important to the whole union.

The reason it was brought is very obvious, but a bit long to write — it’s multiple chapters in my book ;).

Three days after the famous raid, we learned that the White House had pressured Sweden to take action or end up in being trade embargoed like Cuba(!). In Sweden it’s actually illegal for politicians to decide which individual cases the police or prosecutors should prioritise, but they did in ours. There’s been lots of wrong doing in the case, it’s all a big mess.

Rick: TPB has also given rise to a wider political movement. What’s that about and what has been your role in that movement?

Peter: It’s been about the fundamental rights of people, in a modern world. It’s the same as people have been fighting before us, but we don’t recognise it being as important now that we have it. Freedom of speech, expression and assembly. About fair rights, privacy and all that comes with the network.

My role has been to make people understand that there ARE issues and that they should talk about them. I try not to decide for people, rather influence them to take a stance on it. I have not been part of the pirate parties, although I know most of them (especially in Sweden obviously) and I sympathise with their issues. I’m a member of another party that also have the same views at The Pirate Party, but also fight for other things that I see as just as important (particularily animal rights, the environment and equality).

TPB has three founders who are very different when it comes to politics, and all of us have different arguments (from left to right) on why these issues are so important — that’s our big strength, and personally it’s the other two guys weaknesses that they don’t understand how right I AM 🙂

Rick: Your micro-payment system, Flattr, was launched in early 2010. What is it and how has it been going?

Peter: It’s an experiment on how to do exactly what we should do on the internet — share money as we share other information. Very simplified you could call it a facebook Like-button, but with money added to it.

Flattr gives you a wallet that you fill with the amount you can afford to share each month, you decide the amount yourself, between 2-100 EUR. We then calculate how many things you click per month, and share the money equally to the people that created them. A flatrate for flattering!

Rick: What else have you been doing?

Peter: Oh, Lots! I’ve been travelling, speaking and working on Flattr, played music and so on 🙂

Thank you to both Peter and Rick. We’re really looking forward to having Peter at Webstock!

Who better to interview Amanda Palmer than her co-joined Evelyn Evelyn twin, Jason Webley!

Jason: Looking over the list of speakers at Webstock, you and I kind of stand out. With just a couple exceptions, everyone at Webstock is somehow directly involved in creating and recreating the information infrastructure of the web and the world today… and then you’ve got us — a singer and an accordion player. Why do you think the folks at Webstock are interested in hearing from you/us?

Amanda: You know, I had a really interesting experience about a month ago. I wound up as the ONLY artist at a weird conference-planning meeting for the berkman center, at harvard. There were people from ALL across the music, law and entertainment industry, and some real heavyweights….the presidents of EMI, RIAA, ASCAP and those sorts of business heads. And the meeting was a real eye-opener…it was a reminder that I live in a strange bubble of doing without much strategizing, whereas all these people are actually thinking about WHAT I’m doing. It was strangely unsettling to be in a room where people starting discussing “The Artist”, and what “The Artist” wants…and I was like: “wait…who the fuck are you talking about? I don’t know any artists like that.” But then again, I hang out with a bunch of crazed bohemians like you who are much more interested in connecting with people than they are in being rich and famous. But I think it’s important for content and tools to be represented in equal balance when having discussions about art and the internet…otherwise it’s just a bunch of words and theorizing. And the people of Webstock probably don’t know this, but I also think that you and I are perfect examples of how two very similar artists use the tools differently and hold different levels of conversation off and online. We’re like two sides of the same coin — since we’re both fiercly DIY but I’m a much more compulsive twitterer and blogger, with a need to expose and share, and use a team to do it, whereas you come straight from the source without an online team behind you, but don’t put out as much daily product.

Jason: Are you nervous at all? I’ll confess, I have some fear that I’ll start talking and the audience will rise up, armed with whatever the information technology equivalent of pitchforks is, call me out as an impostor and run me into a volcano.

Amanda: I think the beautiful thing about the HOW TO BE AN ARTIST ONLINE discussion is this: since there no fucking rules, you can’t do it wrong.

Anybody saying “but you should be doing x y and z in your social media realm” is missing the point — you CAN, but you don’t have to. I think these people are actually going to be interested in what we have to say about what we do not from a point of judgement, but in a real brain-picking operation theater. They’ve got so much technology to share with us, and we are the very content so many of them live to distribute. I have the feeling it’s going to be a real treat — I’ve done these sorts of conferences before and they can either be really boring and stale or you can leave feeling like we’re a new generation of love-kings who are armed to change the world. Since the Webstock people seem to be awesome, I’m going to assume this conference will fall into the latter category.

Jason: The line-up is really impressive. Are there any talks you are especially interested in seeing?

Amanda: YES. I kind of want to see EVERYTHING. I’ve been (and we’ve talked about this) very interested lately in the art of balancing out life with connection overload — I’m very keen to see where that conversation fits into the conference. I also HAVE TO SEE MERLIN MANN’S MIME. I mean, come on. Mime. At a web conference. Rad.

Jason: Do you think a career like yours or mine would have been possible twenty years ago, before the Internet, before Youtube, before Twitter?

Amanda: Yes. Don’t you remember xerox machines and flyers?

I think we couldn’t do AS much, AS fast, but you and I were both touring in the days before cell phones, smart phones, and constant email. We just used different tools. We xeroxed. We flyered. We connected with less people, less fast, and less frequently. Would we have made it over to New Zealand? Probably not, but who knows.

Jason: Someone was telling me a 2012 end of the world theory that they are predicting huge solar flares that would likely wipe out all satellites on earth crippling communications. Seems extremely unlikely, but I think I’m a fan. If you could vote for an end of the world, what would you pick?

Amanda: Honestly, I think I’d love the few first days of that, but I wouldn’t want to deal with the fall-out that would inevitable produce mass-mayhem and marshall law.

I’d like us to all explode at once, please. Less messy. BUT I think it would be great if we had a few weeks warning, THEN spontaneous earth combustion. That would be a BAD-ASS couple of weeks.

There would be UNPARALLELED mass suicides and dance parties.

Jason: We’re going to be in Wellington for almost a week. Last time I was there I had only about 36 hours. What should we do? Know any good restaurants?

Amanda: We will be spending the majority of our time on Cuba street. Maybe we should both busk and use our busking experiences as a starting point for our talks.

I tried busking outside the Sydney Opera House the other day, the day before my show there (for almost 2,000 people), and NOBODY stopped to listen. It was such a humbling reminder that people don’t have to love you out of context. But maybe we’ll make enough for beer.

Thank you Amanda and Jason! There is absolutely no need to be nervous. And I think I speak for everyone at Webstock in saying that “yes, we are a new generation of love-kings who are armed to change the world!”

John Gruber is the man behind Daring Fireball. We asked his good friend and sometime collaborator, Michael Lopp aka Rands, to interview him in the leadup to Webstock.

Rands: Why the hell would you fly all the way from Philadelphia to New Zealand? It’s the goddamned other side of the world.

Gruber: That was my initial reaction to the invitation. I don’t think I phrased it quite that way when I demurred, but that’s what I was thinking. But everyone I know who’s been there says it’s a gorgeous country. And have you seen the iPhone market share numbers down there? These are obviously my people.

Rands: That’s impressive given the abundant lack of love the carrier Vodafone has given the Kiwis. They make AT&T look good — which is hard. Any idea what you’re going to talk about at the conference?

Gruber: Definitely — which is unusual for me when I agree to speak. But another reason I agreed to go is that I thought of a good topic: the differences and conflict between consistency, uniformity, and individuality in user interface design. I spoke about this topic back in 2006 at the first C4 conference, and it was one of my favorite talks I’ve ever given. Even better, much has changed in the world of UI design since 2006. Back then, there was the desktop and the web. Now, there’s desktop, web, and mobile. And it’s probably worth splitting mobile into two separate fields: mobile apps and mobile web.

Rands: Well, you’re ahead of me. This will be my third Webstock and each time I get off the plane, find the nearest purveyor of flat whites, and then sequester myself in my hotel room as I construct a new presentation. My current presentation title is, “Why you should build your team like Webstock” “Hello Darlin’ — Conway Twitty, The Man, The Music, The Legend”, but who knows what I’ll end up with.

You and I have attended a lot of different conferences together around the U.S. and I’m wondering about your definition of success for a conference. What needs to happen so that when you’re leaving the conference, you’re thinking “Nailed it”?

Gruber: There are two sides to that. One is being a speaker. For me as a speaker, my favorite thing to hear afterwards is something along the lines of “I disagree with you about (some major point of the talk), but, I must admit, you made a good case for that, and have given me something to think about.” I don’t want to get up on stage and tell the audience only what they already know, or what they already believe. I think public presentations are ideally suited for challenging people to change their mind about something. There’s something about making the case with your voice, rather than the written word, that makes it easier to open people’s minds to new ideas.

The flip side is being an attendee. And what I like best about a conference is walking out with an opinion on something that is different than my opinion about that topic when I walked in. Convince me to change my mind about something. I’m sure I’m wrong about many things — a good speaker is someone who helps me figure out what some of those things are.

Of course, the other factor is simply that of entertainment — the simple joy of watching a presentation and feeling like your mind has been fully engaged.

Rands: Agreed. I put equal value on the stumble’n’learn factor outside of the conference proper. How much stumbling into random people results in learning? I think this is one the main reasons you and I continue to attend the likes of WWDC and SXSW is the constantly high likelihood of discovering interesting people with great stories.

Gruber: No doubt about it. I spend so much of my professional life interacting with people solely through the computer. It never ceases to surprise me how different — how much more efficient — face-to-face communication is. You learn things, hear things, say things, and notice things in person that would have gone unlearned, unheard, unsaid, unnoticed otherwise.

I’d say that as my overall day-to-day communication goes ever more computerized, attending a few good conferences per year becomes ever more essential.

Thanks to John and Michael for the interview! We’re really looking forward to having them at Webstock.

Scott McCloud is the acclaimed author of “Understanding Comics” and “Making Comics”.

We’re delighted to have Scott speaking at Webstock. We asked local artist, Jem Yoshioka to interview Scott for us.

Jem: The web is an excellent medium for publishing comics. In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages to this approach versus traditional publishing?

Scott: The primary advantages are a relatively level playing field, potential breadth of audience, lightning fast roll-outs and updates, a more intimate real-time relationship with our audiences, an enlarged palette of creative opportunities, and the elimination of an army of middlemen.

The primary disadvantages are immature business models (though some have taken innovative steps in this direction), audience disincentives to stay with long form works, and a lot of clunky, distracting design models for reading same that impede reader flow.

Oh, and the elimination of the aforementioned “army of middlemen” — if you happened to be one of those middlemen.

Jem: What are the strengths of comics as a method for communicating information?

Scott: When used to teach and communicate, comics provide an unparalleled degree of control over the reader’s narrative and visual experiences, much like film and television, but without the need for the massive collaborative efforts those forms require.

The static, symbolic images many comics artists use lodge themselves more firmly in memory than the ephemera of moving images. We remember symbolically, so static images are the perfect vehicle to encourage retention. And — as I hope I demonstrated in the Google Chrome comic — even some of the most challenging technical information can be communicated effectively when the underlying concepts are visualized.

Using comics, we can then deliver those images in deliberate sequences that can be read and re-read at the user’s own pace. Comics also synchronizes words and images in a way many traditional textbooks fail to do, and use words and pictures interchangeably and interdependently, harnessing the best qualities of each.

Jem: There are some excellent examples and experiments with interactive comics. Is there a particular style or quality you’re interested in seeing develop?

Scott: For those attempting to tell long form stories in webcomics, the quality I most encourage is a seamless uninterrupted reading experience, and that can be achieved in multiple ways. All that’s needed is a format built around a single mode of navigation, so that the readers need only adjust their expectations once, and then can lose themselves in the world of the story.

This can be achieved through clickable screen-fitting pages such as Nowhere Girl by Justine Shaw, or through a single extended canvas like the Wormwold Saga by Daniel Lieske, or even in the experimental multipath comics of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. Despite their radically dissimilar reading models, each one allows end-to-end navigation using only one mode (page clicks, scrolling, or panel clicks respectively).

That said, some to the most interesting experiments in interactive online comics (such as nawlz.com) challenge these principles — and in some cases, the very definition of comics.

In the mobile space, attempts by large print publishers to duplicate traditional page formats are clunky but acceptable for a growing number of readers. Unfortunately, few are designing for the device, hoping instead to just repurpose decades of pre-existing content. The results so far have been predictably bland.

Jem: The internet has increased the piracy of comics. How does this affect both creators and industry?

Scott: Like musicians, many cartoonists encourage the free dissemination of their work and manage to trade big audiences for other kinds of revenue (like advertising and merchandizing). Unlike the music industry, though, there’s no clear iTunes-like hub to offer an alternative. Walled garden approaches like the App Store have traditional publishers excited, but the jury is still out as to whether readers will follow them permanently.

Jem: What is your favourite thing about the online comics community?

Scott: I love the real-time interaction and the fact that artists can come out of nowhere to achieve sizable readerships based entirely on the merits of the work. Relative unknown Daniel Lieske’s first chapter of his Wormworld Saga hit the web only a few weeks ago (on Christmas Day no less!) and, through word-of-mouth alone, has already been read by 200,000 people.

Jem: New Zealand has a small comics community. What advice would you give to our local creators looking to make a career from comics?

Scott: We’re ALL local creators now.

That’s the beauty of this newest rebirth of a great old art form.

As for advice, I’d say talk to Dylan Horrocks; one of the smartest cartoonists anywhere in the world, who just happens to live in Auckland. 🙂

Thank you to Scott and Jem!

Scott is conducting a workshop, Writing with Pictures: The Power of Visual Communication on Wednesday 16 February. It’s a must for anyone looking to tips on conveying complex ideas in a visual manner and will show how techniques from the graphic arts world can be applied in web design and usability.