Swedish culture chief comes out of the closet: "I share files!"

[TankGirl]

Swedish culture chief comes out of the closet: "I share files!"

Ivar Wenster, the culture chief of the Swedish city Karlskrona, might well be one of the first to-be-heroes of the Swedish Pirate movement. Not that he looks outwardly anymore charismatic or heroic than any other city clerk might look. But from the hundreds of thousands of Swedes serving in various state and city offices and establishment jobs, he seems to be the first one to have - excuse my French - the balls to break the atmosphere of fear and hypocracy surrounding the issue of filesharing. He has publicly confessed being a filesharer and thereby automatically risks a two year jail sentence according to the new strict copyright laws of Sweden. A police report has already been filed.

The defiance of the Swedish people to play the copyright game by the rules set by the international media cartels and accepted by their own elected parliament has taken by surprise both the cartels and the Swedish government. The Swedish piracy drama, culminating around the high profile torrent site Pirate Bay and the group of tech-savvy political activists behind it, has quickly become an international headline item. The websites of both the Swedish police and the Swedish government have crashed under online demonstrations. And the international interest on the events is just growing. Because just like the Swedes, the citizens of all modern Internet-enabled nations love to share files with each other and keep doing it on daily basis - despite it being strictly forbidden in their copyright laws.

When cultural chief Ivar Wenster leaves his city office, he becomes a private person with a serious interest in music. Like millions of other music lovers, he has found out that Internet is the best music library there is. Not a particular online shop - with today's prices he could not afford to pay for all the music he consumes - but the Internet as a whole, with all of its diverse and mostly free sources of music. He is furious about the new copyright Swedish copyright law that is criminalizes his hobby. He knows he is not a criminal. He is not ready to give up the best music library in the world. He is not willing to settle for a strictly controlled, expensive shopping mall how the media cartels would like the Internet to be. Being a culture chief he knows the difference between a mall and a library.

From the legislator's point of view the situation has become nightmarish. How to enforce laws that criminalize tens of percents of a population, including more or less the entire younger generation? How to pick the exemplary punishable 'copyright criminals' from among the masses of schoolchildren, students, pensioners and normal, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens? How to keep the masses fearing to do something they already love to do and know how to do? It sounds as hopeless an effort as to deny sex from teenagers with a law.

The last round of European copyright laws, tighter than any of the previous ones, was hammered down the national parliaments in a hasty and undemocratic fashion to say the least. The practical impact of the laws was not explained to the citizens until it was too late to do something about it. In interviews the responsible ministers, many of them with poor knowledge of the Internet and modern technologies, were often confused about what would actually be allowed and not allowed under the new laws. Their confusion is understandable. They did not actually write or thing through these technically complex and obscure laws themselves. The media cartel lobbyists helped them to do that. It was a three-way deal between media cartels, copyright organizations and governments. The glaringly absent party from the negotiation table was the consumer, despite being the primary target of the laws.

No alternative models of royalty collection were presented to the citizens. No alternatives regarding fair use were given to the citizens to discuss and choose freely from. No possibility was given and no time was reserved to have an open, democratic discussion on the principles and the practical details. There was no democracy involved. From the media cartel point it all went down almost too well to be true. And so it did in almost the whole Europe - apart from one little northern country with 9 million citizens called Sweden.

Sweden is a country with a long democratic tradition and a long history of political and military independence. Being an ex-superpower themselves, they have not even feared to defy the superpowers in political issues. They don't like foreign interests dictating them how to live - even how to live on the Internet. While being a modern and international high-tech nation they are at the same time conscious and proud of their national identity and independent history. Justice Minister Thomas Bodström was quick to deny any U.S. influences behind the Pirate Bay raid - he knew how the Swedes would react to it - but the trail was too obvious and the PR damage was quickly done. In the public eye he is already one of the bad guys of the story - a puppet of U.S. media interests. The political pressure is mounting on him and may eventually cost him his job.

Even worse are things with Henrik Pontén, the lawyer head of the media cartel financed antipiracy 'bureau' Antipiratbyrån. Pontén and his bureau are so widely hated in Sweden that Antipiratbyrån had to shut down their website when things started to heat up after the Hollywood-style Pirate Bay raid. He has tried a few times publicly to justify the hardline police action on copyright issues but the efforts have ended up into PR disasters. The Swedish media shows little sympathy to him, and the reader forums of the newspapers filling up with angry posts protesting police action and defending people's right to private filesharing. Many are wondering why he as a media cartel representative is allowed to be visibly present in police operations.

By coming out of his filesharing closet Ivar Wenster brings into mind the famous lonely Chinese protester standing with a plastic bag on the Tiananmen Square and facing the deadly fury of the military tanks in front of him. The media is watching. The Swedish people are watching. Everybody knows that the establishment controls the tanks, and everybody has freshly learned that the media cartels control the establishment. Those with the power in their hands can still drive over Ivar Wenster if they wish, but the political price of such action might turn out to be high in a country where filesharers have already their own party, soaring in popularity, with only three months to go to the Parliamentary election.