12.6.2006
Here's a bit from the 10.6.2006 editorial of newspaper
Expressen, saying a strict "No" to broadband tax, proposed as a method to compensate copyright holders in case Sweden legalizes filesharing.
"Absolute No" to broadband tax
"The police raid against Pirate Bay finally initiated the debate that we should have had already a year ago. At the time we criminalized filesharing, and the only protests we heard were those from the activists. Now that the debate has grown wider, it took only one week until the responsible parties started to bend in the question. This says a whole lot about the quality of legislation work. When a legal proposal comes in an EU directive, we way too often take it as some sort of supernatural force that cannot be influenced on.
It is remarkable that other parties besides Centre Party and Green Party are now starting to realize that we cannot criminalize a whole generation of youth and a whole Internet culture. Downloading films and music from Internet is here to stay. Recording music from radio to cassette tapes and taping films from TV to videotapes cannot be stopped either, even if the content industry really hard tried to do it.
However, it is distressing to see how many Parliamentary parties seem to favor a special broadband tax supposed to compensate artists for the claimed losses of CD sales. The idea is to tax the traffic on Internet so that the state could give money to a particular segment of culture.
This is the biggest threat of socialism since the employee stock funds. The artists will in practice become state employed culture workers. Free culture life will become a joke.
We should be extremely cautious to give the state any permissions to tax new activities. It will soon become like V.A.T. - first a temporary minor cost but soon the biggest cost in the household.
It is also very worrying that the first question for all the parties has been how the artists and the film industry will get paid. A progressive policy in an active broadband country like Sweden would instead protect freedom in the Internet, totally ditch the present laws on filesharing and leave it to the acting parties to find a way to make their money."