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ThePirateBay's Reduced Cash InfusionMay 8, 2006Thomas MenneckeThere’s a final interesting twist to ThePirateBay.org’s endowment of cash from Sweden’s political-reality game show, “Top Candidate.” Many following the story will remember that Petter Nilsson, one of the contestants of the show, stated back in February 2006 that he would donate ~ $6,500.00 in cash to ThePirateBay.org if victorious. "Politics is not something that happens elsewhere, it happens together with those you turn to,” Nilsson said. “If I talk about animal rights, it's because I have devoted my own time to get the animals out of the cages. If I talk about homelessness, it's because I myself have been freezing in a squatted house with the homeless of Stockholm. If I say that immigration policies is scandalous it's because I've had my own door kicked in by the immigration police."So when I donate my money to Pirate Bay, it's because I also want to be able to download music and movies for myself."“Top Candidate” is hosted by SVT, a taxpayer funded public access network. The contestant's goal on “Top Candidate” is to successfully campaign and gather public support for an issue of the his or her choosing. Considering Sweden has a P2P to general population ration of about 1:9 – one of the narrowest margins in the world – it came as little surprise when Nilsson won the game show and $31,000.00 to implement his ideas.That was back on March 12, and little has been heard since.Being a tax supported organization, SVT was reluctant to fork over such a large sum of cash to ThePirateBay.org – an entity that some consider gray-market at best. Wishing to avoid making a political statement or validating ThePirateBay.org, SVT decided to instead hand the money over to Petter Nilsson directly, forcing him to pay taxes.This substantially reduced the originally planned donation from $6,500.00 to $4,656.00 (US.) The donation is still significant, yet $2,000.00 is still a considerable amount of money to lose. Regardless of the reduced donation, ThePirateBay was still able to use the funds towards purchasing a new database and search server. In familiar PirateBay jocularity, the Swedish BitTorrent tracker took the mildly reductive news in stride.“Oh, by the way, SVT is Sweden's public service TV station, so I guess this makes us the first state financed tracker. Pretty cool, huh?”
PS. ghostship is back now, or are you his new right hand man?
