* Swedish Net War diary *

[TankGirl]

10.6.2006

Researcher: broadband tax possible, 1 USD/month maximum

"It is technically possible to compensate the musicians whose works have been copied without authorization by using an extra license fee on broadband connections", says researcher Anders Edström Frejman from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm to Dagen's Nyheter.

"The record labels are no doubt thankful if they can get money from broadband operators, and some sort of measurement and compensation model could surely be agreed on. But I don't think the labels will show green light to filesharing of copyrighted material even then. And that leads to a logical sommersault of them saying that unauthorized copying is forbidden and at the same time demanding broadband users to pay compensations for copyrights.

Frejman himself has in his research managed to develop a counting system to monitor which songs are most often downloaded from a DirectConnect p2p network. He believes it is technically possible to develop similar systems for the five or six biggest p2p networks that exist today. "Similar systems are already used by the American companies who monitor the popularity of songs on p2p networks and then sell this information to the record companies. It won't be 100 % accurate like the system we have for airplay counting but it would still be usable." As the p2p networks are international, the measurement system should take into account only Swedish downloaders but they can be filtered by their IP numbers.

Frejman says that the tax should not be higher than 10 Swedish Crowns (approximately 1 USD) per month. His view is that the big record labels have so far grossly exaggerated their losses. According to a fresh "Music Lessons" study done in the Royal Institute of Technology 55% of filesharers buy roughly the same amount of music as they did before filesharing; 7 % buys slightly more; 3 % much more; 25 % a little less and 10 % much less. Many were also found to visit concerts more actively than they did before filesharing.

[TankGirl]

11.6.2006

Pirate Bay has doubled its popularity

Dagens Nyheter reports that Pirate Bay's website - running presently on Dutch servers - has doubled its popularity since its brief forced shutdown by the Swedish police 31.5. The figures come from the US Internet measurement company Alexa.com. The advertisers are naturally pleased by the development.

"The visitor counts of Pirate Bay have gone up quite drastically in the last few days", says Christian Bönnelyche, the Swedish representative for the betting company Unibet. "This means that our ads there will get more publicity than we expected". The website has now become more popular than the established high-profile websites of newspaper Aftonbladet and online marketplace Blocket. When asked about the legal issues of the site, Bönnelyche compares Pirate Bay to the Swedish Post who delivers letters legally despite there being illegal things in some of the letters. Only if the site as a whole would be proven to do something illegal, would Unibet consider withdrawing its advertising.

[TankGirl]

11.6.2006

Justice Ministery: "Legalizing filesharing would conflict WIPO, UN and EU treaties." - Pirates: "So be it."

Christoffer Démery from the Swedish Justice Department warns in Sydsvenska's interview that legalizing filesharing would lead Sweden into a legal conflict with WIPO intellectual property treaties, UN copyright conventions and EU directives. While the various international deals would leave some room for interpretation with downloading only (leeching), the conflict will be inevitable when it comes to uploading. Sweden can legalize filesharing nevertheless, which will make the situation legally unambiguous to the citizens; in this case Sweden will have to take whatever heat there is to come from WIPO, UN and EU through the various diplomatic channels.

The leading Swedish pirates are fully aware of this but they think it is worth doing anyway.

Rasmus Fleischer from Piratbyrån says: "I don't think that the Swedish opinion needs any formal legalizing. What we want most is a stop to the furious efforts to control what people are sending to each other over the Internet. The discussion about copyrights can take its time and be conducted internationally."

Richard Falkvinge, the leader of the Pirate Party, says: "The eventual penalties that Sweden will have to pay are much less than what we can win here." As for WTO, UN and EU he says: "There has to come a time when we start to change outdated laws. We will begin it in Sweden but we are also thinking about others at the European level. When Europe has changed, the rest of the world cannot ignore this anymore."

[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."

[TankGirl]

14.6.2006

Pirate Bay operating from Sweden since Saturday

Newspaper Aftonbladet reports that Pirate Bay has operated from servers located in Sweden since last Saturday. When Aftonbladet asked for a comment from Håkan Roswall, the prosecutor behind the May 31 raid, it turned out that Roswall was not yet aware of this development. Roswall was sceptical about the news and suspected it to be a 'propagandistic claim' by the filesharers.

"I thought he knew that we are back", says Fredrik Neij from Pirate Bay. "He is welcome to check if he wants." Neij tells that Pirate Bay decided to leave Netherlands after being pressured by the local Justice Department. Their server equipment is partially rented and partially donated by people who want to see the site to get back on its feet. According to Aftonbladet the site remains 20-30 % more popular than what it was before the May 31 raid.

Pirate Bay's IP address resolves presently to the defiant DNS name hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org. At some point after the raid also the DNS name same.tracker.same.place.come.get.me.roswall.thepiratebay.org was in use.

[JackSpratts]

lol@those wacky swedes.

- js.

[TankGirl]

15.6.2006

Swedish Police to propose new actions against filesharers

Expressen reports Swedish police planning "more effective action" against filesharers. What that might imply is yet unclear. "We will present tomorrow some concrete proposals to make our work more effective", promises Stefan Eurenius from the Swedish Police. The request for new copyright law enforcement ideas comes from Justice Minister Thomas Bodström, the leading political figure behind the new stricter Swedish copyright law. The law has since last summer effectively criminalized 1.3 million Swedish filesharers, as estimated by SCB, the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics. Bodström has repeatedly demanded "tough measurers" against filesharers.

The last hardline action - a raid against world's largest torrent site Pirate Bay - turned into a huge political boost for the new Pirate Party, aiming to the Parliament in the coming September 18 election and now having 6891 members. The party is quickly approaching the size of Green Party (Miljöpartiet) that has presently 7862 members and is an already well-established political force in Sweden with its 17 parliamentary seats. The Pirates will need about 225,000 votes to make it to Riksdag, the 349-seat Parliament of Sweden.

[TankGirl]

15.6.2006

Expensive collateral damage from the Pirate Bay raid

Aftonbladet reports that already 15 of the approximately 200 innocent third-party businesses who were kicked offline in the Pirate Bay raid have contacted State officials demanding compensation for their downtime. Many of these businesses are small 1-3 person companies to whom even a week of downtime may prove costly or fatal. The individual demands vary between 1,000 USD and 20,000 USD; the total 'collateral damage' costs of the May 31 raid may rise to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"You could compare this to a situation where the police is trying to catch a given car from a parking hall but ends up confiscating and removing every car from the hall.", says Clarence Crafoord from the Centre for Justice whose lawyers are helping the affected businesses pro bono.

[TankGirl]

15.6.2006

Swedish Police proposal: special p2p prosecutors, p2p investigator teams

The Swedish Criminal Police and Prosecuting Authority left yesterday their proposal for more effective measures to fight illegal filesharing in Sweden, as requested by the Ministery of Justice earlier this spring. The main suggestions are to educate four special prosecutors to handle all filesharing cases and to have dedicated investigator staff to handle filesharing cases, reports newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

So far the filesharing cases have been assigned to whoever online crime investigators have been available in the scarce IT-trained staff investigating also crimes like online pedophilia and online fraud. Same with prosecutors - cases have been assigned to whoever prosecutors have been available. The training of the four special prosecutors (two from Stockholm, one from Göteborg and one from Malmö) is planned to be 10 days long. The p2p investigators will get a five week training to legal and technical issues.

Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån is happy that "the prosecutor understands the complexity of this type of crime and is willing to dedicate resources and get a better competence on it."

Rickard Olsson, one of the candidates of Pirate Party in the coming September 18 parliamentary election, says: "The police and the prosecutors do not understand anything about what is going on, and after their 10 day crash course they will hardly understand anymore. But at least they admit that they don't have any competence on this field today."

[TankGirl]

19.6.2006

Pirate fleet organizing for the battle ahead

The Swedish parliamentary election is only three months ahead, and the Pirates are tuning up their field organization - or rather their fleet organization - for the crucial political battle ahead. Rather than using the dry conventional terms like 'region', 'electroral district' etc. the Pirates have decided to use in their election work marine terminology fitting better to the pirate theme. So for the Pirates, Sweden is divided into five 'fleets', each having several 'squadrons' (electoral districts), and each squadron in turn consisting of a number of 'ships' (local voting districts).

The membership of Pirate Party has now exceeded 7000 members, and the statistics are already starting to favor the party's aspirations for a parliamentary breakthrough. In previous parliamentary elections a registered party member in Sweden has statistically been worth of 30-34 votes in the election. To reach the 4 % voting thresold the Pirates will need each of their present members to be able to generate about 30.3 votes. The structurally most comparable party is the Green Party who managed to generate 30.8 votes per registered member in the previous election in 2002.

[napho]

Wow! TankGirl is in a frenzy You go girl, and don't forget to change your panties.

[JackSpratts]

yeah - her first post in four days. she's really obsessed. napho, i don't know why you're buried in the frozen north. with your cunning intellect, you should be down here, teaching coeds at an Important American University. plus because it's warm, their underpants are more thongier.

- js.

[napho]

Originally Posted by JackSpratts

yeah - her first post in four days. she's really obsessed. napho,

- js.

I was looking at the totality of the thread. All those posts and then she bumps it. Canadians are known for their massive intellect and ability to see the big picture. I would've posted in here sooner but was having a problem buttoning my new jeans. Finally I'm on top of the learning curve.

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by napho

I was looking at the totality of the thread. All those posts and then she bumps it. Canadians are known for their massive intellect and ability to see the big picture. I would've posted in here sooner but was having a problem buttoning my new jeans. Finally I'm on top of the learning curve.

lately it seems tankgirl's responsible for half the total coverage coming out of sweden, which is nothing short of amazing.

as moderator of this forum however i take the welfare of our contributors very seriously, and if i think tg's overdoing it intellectually i may have no alternative than to order some time off. perhaps some physically demanding dungeon activities with a certain helpful northerner may be just the prescription for her.

luckily there's no need for buttons. tankgirl has plenty of belts.

- js.

[TankGirl]

Naphoooo!!! Goddamn, spanking time again! LOL @ Jack.

[TankGirl]

20.6.2006

Swedish economist: "Time to get rid of copyright law"

"It is time to get rid of copyright law", writes Karl-Henrik Pettersson, an economist and author, in Swedish newspaper Expressen. "The thought of not having a copyright law may sound unrealistic. But it is not. A copyright law that is already ignored by millions of young people is in practice already half-gone. And it may very well be in society's best interest to get rid of the law also formally."

He goes on to clarify the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, demanding that the right to make copies is legally clearly separated from the ownership of the artists to their works. "Making this distinction between ownership right and copyright leads to an important insight - that the ownership can remain even if the copyright is taken away. For example, as a creator of music I would always have ownership to my works so I could keep on selling them to companies just like today, and they could keep selling them to the market just like today. There would only be this one important difference: copyrights being removed, the company could not set limits to how many copies of the work are being made, how it is further distributed etc."

He emphasizes common good as the correct basis for legislation. "Naturally we cannot let only media industry and their economical interests to determine whether we should have copyrights or not. An increased benefit for the society must be the basis for a copyright law, just like it is the basis for other laws. Why should we maintain laws that do not give citizens back real value for what they are paying for. I have serious doubts whether today's copyright laws bring any increased benefits for the society at all."

The public debate on filesharing is active in Sweden - and it will probably just heat up as the September election gets closer - with many authors, artists and culture workers coming out with their opinions. The overall response of the Swedish culture community to the filesharing issue favors legalization as proposed by the Pirate Party in its election agenda. There are naturally opposing voices as well but they seem to be in clear minority among artists and culture workers. Many artists express their economical worries about the changes ahead but at the same they time give their support to the legalization as the sensible thing to do.

On the political front only Christian Democrats have taken a definite anti-p2p position while all other parties have either bent to support legal filesharing or at least keep a door open for negotiations.

Digg this piece of news?

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by Karl-Henrik Pettersson

"I have serious doubts whether today's copyright laws bring any increased benefits for the society at all."

"ANY AT ALL"

i know that today's conglomerate-driven ip laws will stand little serious public scrutiny but to actually see an economist write that is a bit breathtaking just the same. that is one powerful statement.

- js.

[TankGirl]

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."

[TankGirl]

20.6.2006

Wikinews has published today this extensive interview with Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.

A couple of samples from the interview:

What is your position on moral rights, as recognized by European Union copyright laws: the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. Do you think these rights should be preserved?

We safeguard the right to attribution very strongly. After all, what we are fighting for is the intent of copyright as it is described in the US constitution: the promotion of culture. Many artists are using recognition as their primary driving force to create culture.

Publishing anonymously or pseudonymously happens every day on the Internet, so no big deal there either.

The right to integrity, however, is an interesting issue. We state that we are for free sampling, meaning you can take a sound that I made for my tune and use it in your own tunes, or for that matter, a whole phrase. That's partially in line with today's copyright law on derivative works; as long as you add your own creative touch to a work, you get your own protection for the derivation. We want to strengthen that right.

You might want to consider the alternative. In the 50s and 60s, a lot of rock and roll bands started doing covers of old classical music. This would almost certainly have been considered to violate the integrity of the original artist - and was considered to do so by many - but in the eyes of many others, it was instead great new culture of a previously unseen form and shape.

So I don't have a definite answer on the integrity issue. While I am leaning towards the promotion of new culture taking precedence over a limitation right, there may be unconsidered cases.

How do you intend to deal with EU treaties which define certain legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual works?

What can they do? Fine us? Send us an angry letter?

Come on, countries need to think more like corporations. If the fine is less than the cost to society, which it is in this case, then the right thing to do is to accept the fine with a polite "thank you".

Actually, national media just called me about this very question; the Department of Justice has stated that we can't allow file sharing, as it would break international treaties. My response was that it is more important to not have 1.2 million Swedes criminalized, than it is to avoid paying a penalty fee.