553: Pirate Bay
| Pirate Bay |
 Title text: We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything. |
[edit] Explanation
The Pirate Bay is an Internet website dedicated to serving up Bittorrent downloads of popular media. The site's servers were taken down, briefly, and the operators were taken to court, back in 2009.
Unlike normal downloads, files downloaded via Bittorrent are not stored on any web server, but instead transferred in small pieces by other people torrenting the same file; these other people are called "peers." Bittorrent allows websites to provide downloads without using up disk space or bandwidth serving up the entire file; instead, they can host smaller torrent files, which simply describe what the finished file should look like and a few "tracker" servers where lists of other peers can be found, and the peers themselves handle all of the bandwidth issues. This approach is used by a number of websites for completely legal downloads (it's popular among smaller game companies providing digital downloads, for instance), but it's mainly associated with piracy.
However, Bittorrent depends on peers actually having the file blocks that you need. People who have already downloaded the entire file, but continue to connect to the network solely to provide that file to others, are called "seeds," and they are an essential part of a healthy torrent. General etiquette demands that people should continue to seed a file until the ratio of data uploaded to data downloaded exceeds 1, although many people feel that one's ratio should be much higher. In any case, closing your torrents as soon as they finish, as mentioned in the title-text, is extremely bad etiquette, so it is punished with nuisance subtitles.
This comic is essentially a pun on this second meaning of the word "peer" - in the US court system, a "jury of your peers" means a jury composed of everyday people like you, while the Pirate Bay operators interpret it to mean a jury composed of people who they've shared files with in the past. The operators feel the latter approach would give them lenience in the trial, since they've always seeded well, thus ensuring those peers have a good downloading experience.
[edit] Transcript
- [Awaiting the judges' ruling at the Pirate Bay trial.]
- Character 1: I wish this were in America.
- Character 2: Why?
- Character 1: I hear we'd go before a jury of our peers, and I've always seeded generously.
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