Swedish Politicians Strike Blows at Copyright Lobby
Written by Ben Jones on January 10, 2008Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote to a prominent Swedish tabloid newspaper ‘Expressen’ to express their dissatisfaction with proposals for dealing with copyright infringers. Now, that number has increased to 13, and the issue seems to keep growing.
Initially, Karl Sigfrid, and 6 other MPs [Members of Parliament] wrote to Expressen (Swedish, English) to express their opposition to a plan proposed by Cecilia Renfors, a copyright analyst appointed by the Swedish government, in what Expressen called “Seven MPs defy the party line: Legalizing file sharing is not just the best solution, but the only solution”. Her plan was that ISPs would close down the connections of filesharers, preventing them from participating in any further copyright infringement. The condemnation for this was broad-based, from the Data inspection Board, the Competition Authority, all the way to the Swedish court of Appeal.
The message from the Moderate Party MPs to their Antipiratbyrån supporting colleagues was “be careful, they will never be satisfied”, drawing parallels to the earlier attempts to ban MP3 players, and VCRs, both areas in which, having failed to ban, industry groups are now making a profit from selling content.
Karl Sigfrid told TorrentFreak that the APB proposals make no practical sense. “I think it could be solved in theory. However, in reality, you would need such a surveillance system to achieve this that it would be all out of proportion. So I don’t think there’s a feasilbe way of stopping individuals copying. The cause for file sharing is basically that it’s possible. People have always done it to the extent that they’ve been able to. With cassette tapes 20 years ago and electronically today. Copyright laws preventing individuals from sharing information have never been legitimate in the eyes of most people.”
When asked about if it was down to content industries being slow to change their business practices, he replied: “It’s hard to say what would have happened if the content industries had been quicker releasing their material online, before the P2P networks grew mainstream. Probably the illegal filesharing would be less extensive, but it’s possible that it would still have been increasingly difficult for iTunes and such services to compete with free downloading. The change needed might be so radical that it’s no longer about selling copies of immaterial products at all.”
Rickard Falkvinge, of the Swedish Pirate Party was understandably upbeat about it. “Karl Sigfrid’s taking a stand marks a major turning point. For the first time, an established politician shows deep-down understanding of the real conflict, instead of cluelessly humming along with a technophobical luddite industry. Some other Swedish mainstream politicians have previously talked in terms of how it’s unreasonable to declare war on an entire generation. Sigfrid is the first to understand why.” His enthusiasm is understandable as, one Swedish torrent user put it “a bunch of members of The Conservative Party have started listening to the policies of The Pirate Party, and they want to jump on their bandwagon, as it’s gaining popularity”.
Gaining popularity it is, as yesterday, thirteen members of Parliament joined in another attack (Swedish only, no English translation at present) on the likes of the APB, and recording industries, saying “The record labels are obviously opposed to a development that makes them obsolete.” However, not everyone has been celebrating. Pirate Bay administrator Brokep was skeptical, saying “I’m intrigued that the debate is sparking up again. There’s been a lot of lies from the politicians. Promises and nothing has happened, so at least this will put the debate back on the map.”
The initial seven MPs were Karl Sigfrid. Margareta Cederfelt. Ulf Berg. Lena Asplund. Staffan Appelros. Lisbeth Grönfeldt Bergman and Göran Montan. Tuesdays additions were Marie Weibull Kornias,Finn Bengtsson, Ann-Charlotte Hammar Johnsson, Sven Yngve Persson, and Anders Hansson.
**UPDATE** Sorry, forgot to add this translation of the second piece, available here
Previously: Download from BitTorrent and Usenet with Your Web Server
Next: UK BitTorrent Users Under More Pressure From Lawyers
129 Responses
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 4 5 6 » Show All
The “pirate hunter” organisations are funded and backed by huge American corporations and their lawyers and politicians.
It’s no wonder that Swedes get angry when a foreign power tries to force them into becoming a police state.
American power should rule America, not Sweden.
Seven MPs are outright opposed to the mafIAA measures.
How many MPs are there total in the Swedish House of MPs?
349 from all parties.
13 for freedom is a start.
349 total from all parties.
13 for freedom is a start.
A follow up article poublished in the same newspaper Expressen:
“This is our second article in Expressen. It’s a response to the Swedish Academy’s secretary Horace Engdahl, who has strongly opposes decriminalizing file sharing. 13 Moderate-Party parliamentarians signed the article.”
http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/horace-engdahl-pushes-for-internet-control/
What strikes me is how young the guy is in the photo. Normally politicians are over 60 in most countries.
@31:
The average age for Swedish MPs is currently somewhere just below 50 years (this page says 47.9 at the last election in September 2006: http://www.riksdagen.se/templates/R_PageFull____11296.aspx).
Having a majority of your legislators above 60 sounds like a bad idea. Someone who is actually going to live in the country for more than one or two decades is probably more inclined to care about making sane laws.
Average age is 47 ? Wow.. No wonder Sweden leads the world in being more modern in their thinking.
gay pirate faggets behind ur pc monitor acting tuff
I think America needs to decriminalize marijuana.
[quote comment="259942"]@23 LOL. “yeah man, there’s gonna be a pirate in the white house someday!”
better than a religious nut who thinks he is god and orders his troops to blindly commit genocide.
[quote comment="259889"]You dorks have no idea how stupid you sound.
always posting with the name Anonymous, or unkown or some dumb crap
You steal from American musicians like brittany spears, a whore who has had more wangs in her than a chinesse phone book,
or like countless others fresh out of rehab same day sucking dick for coke.
[/quote]
yes we must have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
if we like that crap they trying to shove down our throats
[quote comment="260150"][quote comment="259942"]@23 LOL. “yeah man, there’s gonna be a pirate in the white house someday!”
better than a religious nut who thinks he is god and orders his troops to blindly commit genocide.
[quote comment="259889"]You dorks have no idea how stupid you sound.
always posting with the name Anonymous, or unkown or some dumb crap
You steal from American musicians like brittany spears, a whore who has had more wangs in her than a chinesse phone book,
or like countless others fresh out of rehab same day sucking dick for coke.
[/quote]
yes we must have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
if we like that crap they trying to shove down our throats[/quote]
lkhjl
whatever you say, big man… with NPD.
@21:
The day there is a music ISP fee, moviemakers, publishers and everybody else is going to jump on the new public taxation and want a slice of the pie.
Therefore, no, there will be no music ISP fee.
@21, again:
The assumption that a music ISP fee will solve the problem is based on a number of bad assumptions, of which I will pick but two:
1) Music is the most desired content on file sharing networks. I don’t know ANYBODY who cares about downloading music anymore. Music is just ubiquitous, off and on line.
2) File sharing anything larger than music is impractical from a bandwidth standpoint anyway. Well, maybe that’s true in North America, but not in places like South Korea or Sweden. Here, a movie takes 5-7 minutes to download if you get a good pipe - in fact, the bottleneck is all too frequently the local household router, which can only pump 20-30 Mbit/s. I have a 100/100 Mbit connection, and that’s not something you’d raise an eyebrow about in Sweden.
U.S.A. = 3rd world.
Their pipes are so slow it’s painful downloading…
100/100 Mbit connection
Most likely no set MB limits either.
Un Farking believable.
I get a 10GB limit per month then capped to dial-up speeds. Pathetic.
Sweden is the place to be if you want to live in a modern forward thinking country.
the next president of US would be black, after that it would be pirate
[quote comment="260188"]U.S.A. = 3rd world.
Their pipes are so slow it’s painful downloading…[/quote]
so go for a walk, play a game visit with friends enjoy life :)
The worst assumption the music ISP fee is based on is that some central authority can gauge what music is popular and distribute the money fairly. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here’s a neat variation on the idea. Say Last.fm offers a service where you can subscribe for your choice of $5, $10, $20, or $50 a month — or the SEK equivalent or whatever ;) Half that money goes to bands/artists based on how much you listened to their tracks that month. Only tracks that Last.fm is allowed to give free downloads of (at least to subscribers) count towards this. And for subscribers, the downloads are higher quality than the current (Jan. 2007) 128k MP3s, perhaps even going to lossless for those that want it.
If Last.fm themselves won’t do this, anyone could start a competing service that does.
@43: Wouldn’t work, people would still steal.
Whether anyone likes it or not, there is going to be a music ISP fee.
Hey,
I’m an author, I want an Authors ISP fee added also.
I will fight with all other Authors for this right also. It’s not just Music that gets downloaded.!
[quote comment="260243"]@43: Wouldn’t work, people would still steal.
Whether anyone likes it or not, there is going to be a music ISP fee.[/quote]
your right it wouldn’t work, neither will the isp fee
we run the world not you we will do what we want and you cannot stop us
“People would still steal” isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the natural consequence of being able to share information for free, and it should be celebrated for the opportunities it brings.
Brokep wrote a great summary last month of why a “music ISP fee” is unacceptable, though it seemed to go mostly ignored. Read it.
http://blog.brokep.com/2007/12/06/the-problems-with-a-flatrate-system/
Hey.. did the RIAA ever find the music that was stolen?
Pages: « 1 [2] 3 4 5 6 » Show All
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.