It started a few years ago when the Pirates of the Caribbean became a box office success. Then there were the sequels, with Captain Jack becoming a favorite new character. Don’t forget the periodic news stories about Somali pirates kidnapping people over the past several months. Later Michael Crichton’s last book, the posthumously published Pirate Latitudes, is all about those sea-loving rapscallions. But there is a faction of pirates in Sweden that have been making waves the past few years as well.

In 2003, an anti-copyright group, Piratbyran or The Piracy Bureau, began to run a website filled with television programs and movies, among other digital media. Although it changed ownership a couple times, the site primarily has been overseen by a few people including Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neji. The purpose is to make digital material available to all, much of it under copyright. People are free to download what they want from the site after they register. The material is shared in bittorrents, or torrents, which is a cloud network of peer-to-peer distribution system for the sole purpose of transferring large files. The Pirate Bay bills itself as “the world’s most resilient bittorrent site.” Users need to have a software program to send or receive the torrents which download small bits of files from other computers that are connected to the same cloud.

But as “fun” as sharing movies and other media may be, the ramifications are real for the entertainment industry. Movie and music studios have been trying for several years to end the illegal download of copyrighted material. A British publication, Legal Week, cited a 2008 study of 16 countries stating the more than 40 billion files were illegally shared, making the piracy rate 95%. And if you think about the thousands of people who may buy DVDs and then want to share them with others, the ramifications could be great. This is especially true since there also are categories for audio books; games for the Xbox 360, the Wii, and Playstation 3; and computer applications like the Microsoft Office products and Mac applications.

The financial implications, however, mean little to the perpetrators. In fact, The Pirate Bay puts many of the legal threats it receives on the site to mock those who send threats. For instance, a 2004 e-mail from DreamWorks Studios requested its movie Shrek 2 be removed from the site since that is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not only did the response from The Pirate Bay make it perfectly clear that Sweden does not follow U.S. law since it is not a part of the United States, but the pirates suggested the originator of the legal threat do bodily harm to himself in no uncertain terms. Those pirates sure use colorful language. They claim that since the torrent files are saved on thousands of individual computers, no illegal or copyrighted material is actually stored on The Pirate Bay site; this is one of their main assertions of innocence.

Nevertheless, the entertainment industry has continued to work at ending the reign of the violators. And more European countries are working toward ending copyright violations which may help since there is closer proximity than those in Hollywood sending threats. In addition, Sweden introduced a law in April 2009 requiring Internet Service Providers (ISP) to release the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of suspected copyright violators. Around the same time, four of the founders were convicted of helping Internet users download copyrighted films, computer games, and music. They were sentenced to one year in jail after a local Swedish law firm helped convince a local court to do so. So perhaps the pirates may be a little less cocky these days. The litany of lawsuits from various countries has to be a little tiresome. But with an estimated 25 million users, or “peers,” the pirates have a lot of fans.

In the summer of 2009, The Pirate Bay was sold to the Global Gaming Factory which said it will try to work with entertainment studios in the future. Time will tell if the pirates can be tamed, or if lure of free audio books and Xbox games is too great for those swimming in the bay.

Who could have imagined the Europeans, with their centuries of battles over land, wealth, and power, would set an example for the world of collaboration and sharing? While we Americans — smug in our democracy — tussle with issues of intellectual property, copyright, and royalties, the Europeans have banded together to create an unprecedented, free information resource. Europeana.eu is a web portal to the virtually combined collections of one hundred libraries, archives, museums, universities, and other cultural institutions. Visitors to Europeana.eu have free access to books, newspapers, letters, journals, photographs, drawings, paintings, maps, sound recordings, videos, and films. While it is currently a prototype, the European Digital Library (EDL) Foundation intends to present a business model in 2010 that will allow the site to become self-sustaining.

Here in the States, librarians and legal departments are too bogged down in deciding who actually owns the items in their collections to develop rich digital access sites. Fear of violating intellectual property rights ties the librarian’s hands while their institution’s capitalist administrators loathe giving information for free when it may be sold instead. There was a time not long ago when visiting a museum’s website provided access to digital images of much of the collection. Today, most museums present only a few images of select works from their collections. One (intentionally unnamed) museum simultaneously developed a new website and eliminated most of their online image collection. Consequently, the site is visually bland and the online visitor is not inspired to visit in person. It is an injustice to the institution. The museum’s director feared missing a cut of the profits from their works of art potentially gracing books, coffee mugs, and tote bags.

Administrators are not greedy ogres. The money earned from the collection helps to sustain the institution. Protecting the coffers is prudent in today’s world. Corporate sponsors are reducing their contributions or eliminating them altogether. Personal membership in cultural institutions is down. The jobless rates in the U.S. are shocking. The land of plenty is becoming the land of bare essentials. If a buck can be made by licensing the use of a painting for a t-shirt, more power to them. They need every dollar they can get. However, the backlash could potentially be very damaging. Without participation in the digital arena, interest in cultural institutions may wane and visitor counts may dwindle. Scholarship will surely suffer at the hands of restricted access. After all, isn’t scholarship one of the inalienable rights spelled out in our Constitution? Perhaps it is not explicitly stated, but free access to information and the exchange of ideas is essential to democracy.

Our colleagues across the pond understand the value of making information accessible and are betting the benefits of access will outweigh the violations of intellectual property rights. Be assured, issues of copyright are not disregarded or ignored on the Europeana site. Their current policy is stated on a Terms of Service page which acknowledges changes may be made pending a full legal review. In general, the terms of use are similar to other fair use policies. In a leap of faith, institutions all across Europe are generously giving their precious collections and their precious time to serve a greater communal good.