Swedish law enforcement recently raided The Pirate Bay’s former Web hosting service, PRQ, which also in the past has hosted Wikileaks. When it comes to piracy, the proliferation of technology and sharing sites has exacerbated the problem. Watch Dan Glickman, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), talk about how technology and social media have aided and abetted piracy, plus how we can better protect content creators: 

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“For a creative community to survive … they’ve got to know that they have an ownership in that and that they will be ultimately compensated for that or else the likelihood of them doing it in the first place is remote. It won’t happen,” Glickman said. ”In today’s world, it’s just a lot easier to take, to steal, to lift intellectual property because the internet provides a very convenient form to transfer pieces of art and pieces of creative material easily without giving attribution and without giving compensation for it.”

The Pirate Bay, a Swedish site that facilities file-sharing – is the bane of existence for government authorities trying to clamp down on sites that facilitate piracy – copying of music, movies, or other material for widespread dissemination. Last October, Pirate Bay users took to the site’s Facebook page, lamenting the fact that the site wasn’t working properly. News reports said the raid by Swedish authorities knocked PRQ and many site it host offline. The ISP’s owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing. The Pirate Bay is reportedly gaining members over the raid.

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As for The Pirate Bay, the Web site posted on its Facebook page during that outrage:

“Dear internet.

“We have not been raided.
We are not shutting down.
We like turtles, waffles and you.

“Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight.
It’s ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once.
We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart.”

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“It’s a lot more bitter and what I call ‘tribal’ today than what it was when I first came to Congress, which was about 30 years ago,” said Glickman, who previously served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Clinton and earlier represented Kansas’ fourth congressional district. “The party’s have much stronger roles and it has almost become like a parliamentary system.”

Being in the political center is now viewed as “weakness,” Glickman noted, “and that’s tough – that’s problematic.”

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Despite the fact that nine percent of all people don’t currently have a positive attitude toward Congress, there is reason to be optimist on this front.

“I think most members of Congress don’t want to be gridlocked all the time,” Glickman said. “We have to do our best to not get rid of partisanship but to get rid of the gridlock of excessive partisanship and find more ways to think of our country as a team, more than our party as a team.”

Political parties shouldn’t be thinking of each other as “sports teams trying to kill each other,” he said. ”I still think our political system is resilient and I don’t think people want it to fail and we do need to work together better.”

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genConnect was credentialed press at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colo., where we interviewed the premier speakers and attendees at the conference. For more of our video interviews and articles from the Ideas Festival, click here.

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