20.6.2006
Swedish publisher joins the debate: "Share more files!"
Johan Ehrenberg, an author of eight books and the CEO of Swedish culture magazine
ETC, joins the filesharing debate in
newspaper Kristianstadsbladet with a suggestion for filesharers to share even more files.
"So we got broadband into our country. What was impossible just a few years ago is suddenly possible today. The same old funny copper wires and weather-beaten telephone poles carry now a flow of information from the entire world to our computers. But how shall we use these 6 megabits per second?
To share information of course. Music, including our own music, movies, books, thoughts... think what fantastic freedom this actually implies. What I am reading, you can read too, and we can discuss about it, even if we are located on different sides of the globe.
There is only one problem.
This new freedom is being obstructed and opposed by a strange club whose membership consists of multinational media companies, Swedish officials and restless culture workers. These are the forces that fight against free downloading of books, texts, music and movies.
That the police is following the laws made by politicians is one thing. Worse is that those laws were shaped according to the wishes of large companies. As a result, the laws are all about the profits of those corporations, and nothing else.
The artists, writers, musicians, photographers are all fooled by something called 'copyright'. There is this dream that you can write a hugely popular song and live the rest of your life on its profits.
This is insane because the overwhelming majority of Swedish culture workers will never get paid for what they are doing. Take for example an author. When you buy a 200 kr (20 USD) book, the author will get about 20 kr (2 USD) from it. If it is a paperback, the author will get maybe 2-3 kr (20-30 cents). The big money will land on companies and on bookshop chains. As the books in Sweden typically sell under 2,000 copies, you understand easily that almost no authors live on their work but instead on paid presentations, grants, second jobs.
Same with the musicians.
Copyrights simply do not protect the poor. They protect only the rich."
Ehrenberg goes on to describe how filesharing has effectively created a gigantic digital library. The politicians and media corporations oppose the library idea fiercely as it would diminish a large part of their present power over what is distributed and to whom. "But naturally you should keep downloading more with your broadband during the summer", he concludes. "In the election we can demand that the parties organize a simple compensation system to those who have done the work. The fine thing about Internet is that we can easily establish counting methods for how many times various books and songs are being downloaded. It is the will to do so that has been missing. Both from the media corporations and - so far - also from the politicians."