Saturday, February 21, 2009

Crowdsourced management could be a legal loophole

I've been following the court case of the team from PirateBay P2P File Sharing service with some amazement. Firsly they had half of the charges against them dropped on the first day of their prosecution and secondly the Swedish team behind it seem more intent on having huge parties before any decision has been arrived at.. how liberating!

Anyway, it seems that the organic and non-hierarchical oganisation structure of the company may prove to be their saviour. It seems that on Thursday the case prosecutor had some difficulty understanding how the collaborative organisation of the site worked.

In an effort to understand who the boss was, when asked "But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic" the defendant Fredrik Neij answered "No. Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it." Humourous stuff perhaps... but it may also be intersting to see how the Swedish legal system copes with allocating blame in a crowdsourced situation.

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