Quality, not quantity

photo: Wikimedia Commons

Came across this little comment at the end of a (not that interesting) Guardian piece on the Pirate Bay verdict:

The celebrity and technophile Stephen Fry added controversy to the debate today by commenting on the case on Twitter: "Pirate Bay not saints. But we've got to think about this rationally & sensibly. Shouting 'thief' all the time is no help. I stole in cassette age."

Takeaway conclusion: the Pirate Bay verdict is so mind-numbingly stupid that an actor/comedian with a mood disorder can write something smarter in 140 characters.¹ The verdict itself is 194.000 characters. That's more than thirteen hundred times more characters. It's not the size that counts, as the Norwegian foreign minister explained to the national convention of the Norwegian Labour Party yesterday.

Btw, remember what I was saying earlier, about how the Swedish Pirate Party gained 5.000 members on the day of the verdict? There seems to be a certain amount of dissatisfaction among the key groups of music/film/software-customers (a.k.a. middle-class people who use computers), if I'm reading this straw poll at the Guardian correctly.

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1. A mind-bendingly clever and well-read technophilic one, mind. And one who makes very interesting documentaries about his mood disorders, which, to put a nice little twist on the story, get pirated onto YouTube so you can watch them in reasonably high definition before eventually, according to the latest data, actually buying the DVD or watching the film on your TV the next time it reruns.