When you think of torrenting and The Pirate Bay, most people wouldn’t really think of the term ‘Produsage’, but it’s a principle that we’re all currently doing. There would be no Pirate Bay without you and me. A simple way of summarising what i’m saying, is that the uploaders are downloaders. When you torrent anything from The Pirate Bay, you are giving back by seeding to others that are downloading the same torrent, which is how peer-to-peer file sharing works. And these users also make torrents available, they upload a magnet link to files they wish to share, and users can easily access these files to download. The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host or create content themselves, the users do everything, so the term ‘produsage’ can be related to the Pirate Bay very easily.

Axel Bruns describes four key characteristics of produsage being permissive, unfinished, having fluid movement of roles and having an organisational shift (Bruns 2007, p.3). The Pirate bay shows all of these characteristics within itself. The Pirate bay is always unfinished. New torrents are always being uploaded, nearly 10,000 torrents are uploaded every day. In fact, they just hit their 10,000,000th uploaded torrent, and for those interested, it was in fact porn. I hear the storyline was great. And from a hardware perspective, it’s always changing to compete with the legal issues it’s facing.

To say that The Pirate Bay is permissive, in my opinion, is about as factual as North Korean propaganda. Both the founders and the users completely disregard any legal implications of their actions. They don’t have ‘freedom of behaviour’ to upload and share torrents, in fact for those that have been living under a rock, it’s illegal in Australia (except for shared legal software). But in terms of actually contributing towards The Pirate Bay, in the eyes of the moderators and founders, users are free to contribute whatever they want, and are encouraged to be as creative as they wish.

The concept of “uploaders are downloaders” includes the fluid movement between roles within The Pirate Bay. You don’t have to be Jack Sparrow to upload and download content. That concept could also be used to describe the organisational shift, you don’t have a team of moderators providing the content, the users create their own content and they simply allow you to access that content through magnet links.

The Pirate Bay is a collaboration and collection of participatory media, and without the user participation that they receive, it would be nothing. It’s a community built on freedom and creativity, and it’s based around the participatory nature of users.

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References:

Bruns Axel, AB 2007, ‘Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition

Ernesto, 2014, Pirate Bay Hits Historic 10 Million Torrent Milestone, TorrentFreak, Weblog, April 21st, Viewed 25th April 2014, <http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-hits-historic-10-million-torrent-milestone-140421/ >