Afterthoughts on the Pirate Bay controversy, part 2

As I have described earlier, an indexing of torrent links constitutes one among many other forms of making-public; that is, publication.

2) Different degrees of making-public
Publication is not an absolute term; there are degrees of making public. A document passing in or out of a Swedish public institution is by default defined as legally public. However, parts of it can be censored under certain conditions. Further, due to more recent data protection laws (PUL), an administrative document like this can actually be public yet simultaneously not intended for further circulation, or mass-reproduction.
In the now-infamous case, as so often when Internet technologies are involved, the agency which acts to make public does not reside in but one actor. It is rather to be seen as an upshot of the sad configuration which arises between actors in a media ecology we are still grasping to fully understand:

Afterthoughts on the Pirate Bay controversy, part 1

…and hopefully the beginning of a debate on what “making public” really means in an era of rapidly increasing digital accessibility and complex media ecologies.

1) The interests and range of action of The Pirate Bay
On Thursday 11 September, Swedish public service television SVT hosted a debate on the affair which The Pirate Bay has recently been the focus of. This whole affair flared up due to the Swedish commercial broadcaster TV4 making the “scoop” that public documents containing forensic evidence from a recent, very well-known Swedish murder case were floating around as BitTorrent files, and that the initial link to these files was posted on the site in question. A veritable torrent of interest was then generated by this TV4 news story, and the number of downloads of said torrent increased near-exponentially.

The Pirate Bay: the fine line between publishing and “merely providing” data

A recent controversy illustrates the dual role of The Pirate Bay. When this infamous web site published links to files containing forensic evidence in a well-known Swedish murder case, and the victims asked to have the links removed, the website administrators staunchly refused.
Is this example of making-public controversial data to be seen as the operation of an allegedly “neutral” service provider? Or should we rather see any such operation as a form of publishing (making-public) in and by itself? Especially since The Pirate Bay is a website which does all this within a commercial remit. And more importantly: the site itself actually serves to change public opinion on what material should be publicised or best left untouched…