Pirates of the European II: The Empire Strikes Back
 

Source: TCS Daily

The [Pirate Bay] raid set off a major debate in Sweden, and it was well covered in other European countries, as Sweden has become the epicenter of ideological resistance to intellectual property in its present form.

May 31st has become a landmark date in the history of the intellectual property debate. On that day police in Stockholm raided the server of The Pirate Bay, an infamous source of pirated films, music, computer games, software and media. The site provided torrent files- merely pointers to sources of data but without copyright themselves -- a practice that, though disputed, is still legal in Sweden. The loophole had allowed the Pirate Bay to avoid the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) crackdown on torrent hubs in 2004. Sweden's current move was precipitated by a threat from the US State Department to bring the issue to the World Trade Organization.

Sweden's high proportion of Internet connected citizens, with 10 percent of the population participating in file sharing in the last quarter of 2005, according to Statistics Sweden (www.scb.se), proved fertile ground for the IP-critical movement. The Pirate Bay sparked the creation of a network of file-sharing supporters called the Pirate Bureau (Piratbyrån). The Pirate Bureau was formed as network, providing a place for discussion in which surprisingly often people from both the left and the right of the political spectrum found themselves united in criticism of intellectual property protections.

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