TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard

At the turn of this century, the Swedish file sharing platform The Pirate Bay was growing at a phenomenal rate, enabling internet users to share films and music free of charge. But Hollywood in particular does not pull any punches when it comes to such breaches of copyright and, in 2008, the founders of the platform were put on trial. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde live in their own digital world. They can hardly believe it when the court confuses megabit and megabyte. Seeing themselves as technicians whose aim is to run the world's largest web platform, they claim indignantly that their actions are about freedom, not money. The closer the film gets to them, the more pronounced their lofty perspective on reality becomes.
In his feature-length debut, Simon Klose sees the Pirate Bay hackers through a very different lens to the one used by Hollywood’s media lawyers. It becomes clear that they are not hard-nosed rip-off merchants but rather unworldly nerds, whose social skills and ability to comprehend the analogue world are somewhat limited.
by Simon Klose Sweden / Denmark / Norway 2013 85’

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