* Swedish Net War diary *

[TankGirl]

Latest developments from Sweden:

Ahoy! The pirate ship is sailing again!

Pirate Bay is back online running on new servers located in Holland. Despite the forced move into a new hosting service in another country the site seems to have succesfully restored virtually all of its indexing data from the backups, and the functionality of the site is also being quickly restored. The first new video posted to the site was a control camera capture from the police raid that shut down the site three days ago.

Demonstrations in Stockholm and Gothenburg

Support demonstrations for Pirate Bay are taking place today in the two largest cities of Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg (Göteborg). The demonstrators, backed by four official political organizations, demand the returning of the seized servers, a stop to all raid-related police inquiries, destruction of the DNA samples taken and answers to a number of tough questions from the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who was responsible for initiating the Pirate Bay raid.

A 17-year old hacker took down the Swedish police website

Newspaper Aftonbladet has found out that a 17 year old high school student was responsible for the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that took down the website of the Swedish police for over a day. The hacker told Aftonbladet that it took an hour from him to organize the attack. Thousands of compromised 'zombie computers' were used in the attack, and the effect of the attack was further amplified by the curious surfers from around the world who went to browse the website from the links posted into popular sites like Digg.

Aftonbladet: "Generation War"

"The entertainment industry has no chances against the youth", writes journalist Lena Mellin in her Analys (Analysis) column in the large Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. "The shutdown of the pirate site Pirate Bay has led to a generation war. On the other side are the old people and the law. On the other side are the young people and the Internet." Her view is supported by the official participation of several political youth organizations in today's support demonstrations for the Pirate Pay. Many well-known younger politicians of the established Swedish parties have already openly challenged the official copyright policies of their respective parties.

- tg

In the picture below Pippi Långstrump, a popular anarchistic children book character created by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Like the Swedish pirates, Pippi is smart, resourceful and does not fear to challenge the bad guys or the authorities. Pippi's entire name in English is Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim's Daughter Longstocking.

[TankGirl]

Pirates recover faster than the Swedish police

Newspaper Aftonbladet organized a humorous online poll asking people to guess which of the two websites, Pirate Bay or the Swedish Police, will manage to come back online first. Indicating the huge public interest in the pirate drama, nearly 70,000 people participated in the poll, with 93 % of the people putting their bets on Pirate Bay. And indeed, at the time of this posting, the Pirate Bay website is online while the website of the Swedish police is still down.

Pirate Party keeps growing at record rate

With demonstrations underway in Stockholm and Göteborg, new people keep joining the Swedish Pirate Party literally by the minute. The member count is 4958 at the moment of this posting. The Party will need 225,000 votes in the parliamentary election to be held in September to pass the 4 percent thresold required for parliamentary representation. This is not an unrealistic goal considering there are an estimated 1,3 million active filesharers in Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants.

Led by a charismatic 34-year old IT specialist Rickard Falkvinge from Sollentuna, the party has set 10 candidates to its national candidate list, including the leader of the party, plus 12 local candidates. The party has only three issues on its agenda (in English, worth reading!): a radical reform of the copyright law, abolishment of the patent system and the securing of people's right to privacy. In the relatively split Swedish political field even a small number of parliament members might give them a good strategic position to advance these goals.

In the picture below Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party:

[TankGirl]

Peaceful pirate demonstration in Stockholm

Swedish Television reported about 500 people participating in the demonstration. In his speech one of the Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, asked the Swedish officials to calm down and stop fighting against the Internet. "It is a battle you are never going to win", he said.

According to blog reports the demonstration went peacefully and in the spirit of unity despite the diverse political groups being represented. Also the police was reported behaving friendly and peacefully.

Pirate Party keeps growing

Pirate Party's member count has just gone over 5000. It is now approaching in size the Greens (Miljöpartiet) who have 17 seats in the 349-seat Swedish Parliament. It took 4.6% of votes in the last parliamentary election for the Greens to get their 17 seats.

Pirate Bay to operate from four countries

According to Pirate Party, Pirate Bay will operate in future from four different countries - Holland, Russia, Ukraine plus one unnamed EU country. The sites will mirror each other so that a possible takedown of one site should not even cause any service breaks for the customers. The Pirate Bay staff called out for help on Internet after the police raid, and "when we told people that we are from Pirate Bay, Sweden, needing help with hardware and hosting, offers of help started to flow in immediately. Pirate Bay is now stronger than it has ever been!"

[JackSpratts]

additional sources

swede snid dolkow has been busy on his blog translating the coverage into english for all us swedishly challenged readers. so busy in fact that he had to pack it in abruptly the other night after working a marathon session. also, from the reboot conference in copenhagen chaos radio has an in depth interview with peter from the pirate bay (43 min mp3). dig those cool accents. makes me want to head on over. would i love to be there right now. i can amost smell the coffee.

- js.

[TankGirl]

I remember discussing the p2p-political developments with Jack maybe a year ago or so. Already at that time it looked like Sweden might be the breakthrough country where the p2p issue would first get truly political and the democratic forces could start to have an effect. For a little while France seemed to take the lead as a group of rebellious French parliament members voted through a law that would have effectively legalized personal filesharing but unfortunately the vested interests managed to intervene and water down the French law.

It takes only one advanced industrial country that officially legalizes p2p or at least makes it non-punishable to make a big difference on how things will evolve on the global scale... and right now Sweden seems to be on a steady course towards that status.

- tg

[TankGirl]

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

Swedish government website collapses

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that the website of the Swedish Government has collapsed. The problem seems to be so serious that the Government representative does not expect them to get it up overnight even if they are constantly working on it. The website serves as a portal to all government departments, including the Foreign Ministery and Immigration Officials.

Antipiracy Bureau goes voluntarily offline

Dagens Nyheter also reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization financed by the media cartels will shut down its homepage for the moment "because it is rather lively right now out there in the Internet", in the words of Henrik Pontén, the nationally hated lawyer head of the organization, responsible for the raid against Pirate Bay.

700 people in demonstrations

An estimated 500 people in Stockholm and 200 people in Gothenburg took part in the Pirate Bay support demonstrations organized by the Pirate Party and three political youth organizations. The Swedish Television was present, interviewing participants. Image galleries from the demonstrations here and here.

Pirate Party soon larger than the Green Party

Pirate Party's member count keeps soaring. At the time of this posting there are 5215 members in the party - up from around 2000 before the police raid on Pirate Bay. At this rate it will take only days for the Pirate Party to become larger than the Green Party, already represented in the Swedish parliament.

- tg

[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by JackSpratts

additional sources
also, from the reboot conference in copenhagen chaos radio has an in depth interview with peter from the pirate bay (43 min mp3). dig those cool accents. makes me want to head on over. would i love to be there right now. i can amost smell the coffee.
- js.

Piratebyrån's Rasmus Fleischer's speech at the Reboot Conference is available here:

Piratbyran's speech at Reboot

It's one of the most insightful commentaries I have seen on the copyrights issues in the era of filesharing, definitely worth a read!

A couple of samples:

Metadata, not copyrighted material, is the war on piracy's target

...

Pirated copies will be produced, no matter the fate of file-sharing networks. We're all too often today equalising unauthorised digital copying with file-sharing networks, but it's a fact that a lot of the illicit warez arrives at the hard disk from a physical storage medium, like an usb-device, a borrowed cd or a burned dvd.

To the extent that some people may avoid P2P networks, research shows that they just reconnect to other sources of data – be it physical copying from family and friends or files exchanges with mail and chat clients. It's all a piracy performed in a grey zone outside surveillance.

So the question is not piracy or not, nor if darknets are desirable or not, but what infrastructures piracy will take use of. Burning cd's or gmailing files or giving them away with services like Yousendit.com, means quite much that piracy is stuck in the same infrastructure that it had during the era of the cassette tape and the photocopier, only multiplied by digital effectivity. There is still a dependence of finding someone (a friend, a library) with access to the source. File-sharing networks, however, connects every private archive that in one particular moment is connected, into the largest and most accessible archive ever.

About mental rights management

...

It is essential for the copyright industry to keep the majority of computer users trapped in the belief that the ”window” of their web browser is exactly a window, through which they can look at information located elsewhere, under someone else’s control. Then our job is to clarify that everything you see on your screen or hear through your speakers, is already under your control.
Zeros and ones have no taste, smell or color – be they parts of pirated material or not. Therefore it is impossible to construct a computer that cannot reproduce and manipulate these zeros and ones – as such a machine would no longer be a computer, but something as grotesque as a digital simulation of the machines of the last century.

Rasmus speaking at the Pirate Bay support demonstration in Stockholm 3.3.2006, a day after his speech at Reboot:

[TankGirl]

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."