[Privateer]

Greetings y'all...

A bunch of us in Eastern Europe were wondering why we keep getting raided by the Police, when we noticed all the commotion in your country

As a citizen of Romania, who's policy on copyright is dictated from Bruxelles, I think that it's up to the sweeds to crash the copyright laws and make p2p at least semi-legal.

Your rare political environment, characterized by a rather small and educated voting population, a somewhat leftist perspective on property, and good penetration of the internet and technology, makes Sweden one of the best candidates for leading the way in rethinking digital property in Europe. If pirates can't get a foothold in the Swedish parliament, it's extremely hard for them to do so in countries like the UK, France, Italy, Germany or Romania. In fewer words, hoards of filesharers all over the EU probably look up to the northern fellows - with hope - these days.

I would like to congratulate TankGirl for keeping an internationalized eye on what's going on in Stockholm, and I'd ask if it were possible that more of the content she links to would be translated in English.

Thank you.

[TankGirl]

Privateer, on Jun 6 2006, 06:44 AM, said:

I would like to congratulate TankGirl for keeping an internationalized eye on what's going on in Stockholm, and I'd ask if it were possible that more of the content she links to would be translated in English.

Thanks for the thanks, Privateer, and good luck to your copyright battles in Romania!

For the fresh English translations, the best source at the moment seems to be Snild Dolkow's blog mentioned by JackSpratts earlier in this thread.

[TankGirl]

Latest development, 6.6.2006:

Swedish Green Party now officially wants to legalize 'downloading'

...and it did not take long for the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet) to make legalizing of personal 'downloading' an official campaign issue. This goes straight against the political program of their most likely political partner in the next government, the influential Social Democrats, who have been instrumental in bringing the new tougher copyright laws into Sweden. It is worth noting though that the Greens talk about 'downloading' only which suggests that they are not ready to legalize modern p2p software where uploading is an essential part of the network functionality. And as noted earlier, the credibility of the Greens in this issue is not high, but the development itself is remarkable. The mere possibility of Pirates entering the Swedish parliament is changing the established political field in relation to the filesharing issue.

[TankGirl]

[TankGirl]

Latest developments, 6.6.2006

Media game getting dirty

At this stage it seems likely that the news of a Pirate Party memberlist 'circulating in Internet', first claimed by journalist Robert Triches in Aftonbladet, was a fabricated smear and scare effort by the journalist himself and his unknown background forces. The journalist never could deliver this 'list' to Pirate Party for verification; there were no signs of hacking on Party's computer, and despite some 100 or so of the finest pirates looking for this list from Internet they could not find a sign of it. Now if these guys cannot find something from the Internet, it probably is not there!

Pirate Party leader: "Greens are cheating filesharers"

Alarmed by Pirate Party's sensational membership growth and facing a very real risk of dropping below the 4 % vote thresold and thereby having to leave the parliament, the Swedish Greens quickly jumped to the p2p bandwagon and included the legalization of 'downloading' into their official campaign items. In reality they are not promising anything beyond the corporate distribution model, says Pirate Party's Rickard Falkvinge. There are no p2p networks with downloaders only. It's all about downloading and uploading, and only if you legalize both, you are really legalizing filesharing, he emphasizes.

95 % of pirates will have a vote in the election

Bernt Granbacke, one of the many volunteering Pirate Party field workers, gives some interesting statistics about party membership in an interview for Norlänska Socialdemokraten. He tells that the party grows nationwide at a rate of 20-100 new members per day, and that 95 % of party members are in a legal voting age. Perhaps surprisingly the members are not predominantly young people but mostly from the age group 30-50 years. When asked about the position of the party in the traditional left-right axis, Granbacke answers with a question: "Where would you like to have us?"

Election specialist: "Filesharing will be one of the main election themes"

A nationally respected statistics professor and election specialist Peter Esaiasson has already gone on record saying that filesharing will be one of the main themes of these parliamentary elections. Greens have already responded to the signals and made their own p2p-friendly facelift, and there may be pressures in other parties to do something similar.

[TankGirl]

7.6.2006

Court decision: 26-year Swede to pay fines for sharing a movie on DC

Aftonbladet reports that a lower court in Gothenburg has sentenced a 26-year old Swedish man to pay 16,000 Swedish crowns (1735 euros / 2221 USD) as fines for sharing a movie on a Direct Connect hub. He was the third filesharer sentenced under the new Swedish copyright law, and all sentences so far have been fines only. Media industry appealed earlier one of the sentences to a higher court which refused to consider the appeal.

From the practical point of view it is important that the filesharing punishments have been fines only. This means that the crime is considered so small that it does not give the police a permission to force the ISPs to identify the people behind IP numbers in filesharing networks. This is a remarkable security factor for the Swedes, one of the most active filesharing nations in the world. US-style John Doe cases which the media cartels have used actively to extort money from American filesharers are out of question in Sweden.

In a related reader poll in newspaper Expressen 85 % of people consideres it wrong to sentence filesharers while 15 % accepts it.

[TankGirl]

8.6.2006

Larger parties bend to support filesharing under political pressure

Following the example of the Swedish Greens, the leaders of two other Swedish parties, Moderate Party (Moderaterna) and Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet), have now also come out and declared a change in their filesharing politics, reports Expressen. Both parties are now willing to review the new strict Swedish copyright laws so that they would allow domestic filesharing, despite the same parties voting for these strict laws just a year ago. "We cannot go chasing after a whole generation of young people", says Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of Moderate Party. "The idea was to address commercial piracy, not to chase private persons", says Lars Ohly, the Swedish Left Party leader. Both party leaders told that they had changed their minds after seeing the recent police actions against filesharers.

By challenging the established parties with their 3-point agenda the Pirate Party has already managed to cause a major shift in the Swedish political climate regarding filesharing. The Moderates are the second largest party in the Swedish parliament with their 55 seats; Left Party has 28 seats; the Greens, who joined the p2p bandwagon earlier, have 17 seats. Together their 100 seats represent a third of the Swedish parliamentary power. And all this has happened in just a couple of days, with three months still to go to the election. Filesharing will be one of the central election themes in Sweden this time.

The main catalyst for the massive political shift has of course been the soaring popularity of Pirate Party. Now the established parties have realized that they risk losing votes to the Pirates not only from among younger voters but from all age groups in a country where filesharing is a national hobby. As for the young generation, results from a large national Youth Poll (mimicking Parliamentary election with the same candidates) were published yesterday. The established parties were going fast downhill while the great winners were Swedish Democrates (Sverigedemokraterna), a radically nationalistic right-wing party, and Pirate Party, which got 4.7 % of the votes - enough to take it to the Parliament in the real election. However, the poll was done before the Pirate Bay raid - an event that sent Pirate Party's popularity skyrocketing. The party has tripled its member count since the raid, now at 6324 members.

[Tackdaddy]

this is good news, i hope they keep fighting.

[TankGirl]

8.6.2006

Three out of four first time voters support filesharing

Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan has just released results of a poll charting the opinions of first time voters on the filesharing issue. The results show that three out of four first time voters support filesharing, legal or not, and the support comes similarly from political left and right. "Anybody who is doing business with copyrighted material has reason to be worried", says Nicklas Källebring, an opinion expert from the Temo institute who run the poll.

The participants were asked whether they feel it is ok to download files from Internet even if it is illegal, to which 38 % answered yes without reservations and 39 % answered yes with some reservations.

"It is quite bizarre that we have tried to criminalize something that is a part of everyday life of young people", comments the results Ida Gabrielsson, a spokeswoman for Young Left, a youth organization of the Swedish Left Party. Two out of three of her party supporters gave an unreserved 'yes' to filesharing in the poll. Usually the thresold for people to admit supporting something illegal is very high, even in opinion polls. The filesharing issue seems to be an exception to this rule. "Obviously many voters think that this particular law is extremely stupid", says Temo's representative.

The poll was done in May, before the MPAA-initiated Pirate Bay raid, a landmark event in the Swedish Net War.

Broadband tax? "No thanks", say both pirates and antipirates

Two high-level managers from Swedish Radio came out yesterday with a compromise proposition of a broadband tax to solve the Swedish filesharing controversy. The proposition was quickly rejected both by the pirates and by the antipiracy organization Antipiratbyrån. A reader poll in Aftonbladet confirms that the public does not like the idea either: 80 % of readers oppose proposed tax, with 15 % supporting it.

"The problem with this kind of solution is that filesharing is a very widespread phenomenon. Most people are not downloading well-known bands but smaller, unsigned bands. The tax money would end up to the pockets of the well-known bands though", says Tobias Andersson from Pirate Bureau. "Yet another tax sounds like a classical Swedish solution. I would instead like to see our politicians stand firmly behind the new stricter laws and keep communicating to people that it is illegal to download copyrighted material", says Henrik Pontén, the head of media cartel controlled Antipiracy Bureau.

In the present pre-election opinion climate the politicians do not seem to be ready to pay the price of standing firmly behind the media cartel friendly laws. Three established parties have already officially indicated to be willing to legalize personal filesharing - a major political achievement from Pirate Party, founded only six months ago.

[TankGirl]

9.6.2006

Pirate Party: "Downloading is not filesharing"

Now that already three other parties have changed their positions on the issue of filesharing, Pirate Party is challenging them with its new press release to be precise and honest about what they are promising to voters. Many of the newborn p2p-friendly politicians are merely talking about legalizing 'downloading' while Pirate Party emphasizes in its own agenda how the legalization of both downloading and uploading is necessary for modern p2p networks to be legal. Legalizing uploading has far-reaching consequences: it empowers individuals to act as free global distributors for any legal content they want to share without fear of punishment or costs. The idea is not to legalize distribution of illegal content like child porn but otherwise sharing e.g. copyrighted music or movies would be legal.

Pirates buy a lock of Justice Minister's hair

Dagens Nyheter reports how Piracy Bureau (Piratbyrån) has bought a lock of Justice Minister Thomas Bodström's hair in a charity auction broadcast on the Swedish P3 channel. The winning bid was 10,101 Swedish crowns (1086 euros / 1383 USD). "That really touched me", commented Bodström who has come under a lot of political pressure due to his role in the Pirate Bay raid. "And the absolutely best thing is that now they have the copyright to that lock and can do what they want with it".

The studio audience whispered something about 'taking a scalp' and 'hairrising'. "We will naturally make business with it", announced Pelle Thorsson, the representative of Piratbyrån in the studio. "For example, we can sell each single hair on eBay".

[TankGirl]

9.6.2006

Fourth Swedish party bending in the filesharing issue

Dagens Nyheter reports that Center Party is now also changing its stand on the filesharing issue. With its 22 seats the party is the second smallest in the Swedish Parliament. Center Party's Johan Linander says: "Copying of copyrighted material does not always lead to fewer sold CDs. Many of the songs would never have been bought on an album. My impression is that filesharing rather leads to an increased interest in music and films, which in some cases can increase sales figures too."

There are seven parties in the Parliament, and now four out of them have already announced being ready to review to law and to allow private filesharing. The parties still opposing a change in the law are Social Democrats (144 seats), Liberal Party (48 seats) and Christian Democrats (33 seats). Marianne Carlström from Social Democrats is unwilling to change a law that has come into effect just a year ago. "But it is clear that we are following the issue", she says, leaving a door open for negotiations. Should Social Democrats - by far the largest party in Sweden - also give in under the mounting political pressure, the legalization of filesharing would be almost certain already before the election. This would be a major political victory for the pirates and a powerful example for the filesharers in other countries to follow.

[vernarial]

Keep the pressure on. Good Job! A shining example!

[TankGirl]

10.6.2006

Researcher: broadband tax possible - 1 USD per month max

"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.

[Roadblock]

There has always been alternative ways to compensate the artists by taxing blank media, etc. The **AA's just aren't interested. It's all about the power. They are trying their best not only to keep what they have had, but to increase it into other areas of control. I hope this works in Sweden. It might make some other countries wake up and take notice.

[vernarial]

I always find it funny when people speak of artist compensation. More often than not the artist has signed away his copyrights to the media cartel. The **AA cartels don't care about the artist. There are a million more artists out there that would give their right arm for a big label contract. This compensation we speak of will mostly go to the cartels and not the content creators(artists).

[Roadblock]

Vernie, I totally agree. What I was referring to was in theory. There are still ways to get the money directly to the artists. Of course, we may have to blow the **AA's to oblivion first, but who among us isn't in favor of that.

[TankGirl]

vernarial, on Jun 10 2006, 12:17 PM, said:

This compensation we speak of will mostly go to the cartels and not the content creators(artists).

Well, I think it is just a question of how the legislators want to define it, and that in turn depends on the prevailing political powers. Should the Swedish experiment proceed so that a political consensus is reached on a broadband tax and on the total sum to be collected, then the next political question will be who will be allowed to the negotiation table to split the income. Should the Swedish pirates have a healthy parliamentary presence after the September election, at least they could be expected to strongly defend compensation also for the unsigned artists whose works are popular on p2p networks. The pirates have already made explicit statements about this.

[multi]

Young voters back file sharing

The majority of young people who will be allowed to vote for the first time this September during national elections are in favour of file downloading - despite the fact that it is illegal.

The youngest voters, those aged 18-20, say the law prohibiting file sharing is wrong and is a cultural phenomenon, according to a May poll conducted by the Swedish paper Sydsvenskan and Temo Synovate survey.

More

[rastaX]

3 Stooges
Moe seemed a combination Stooge and hard headed businessman. He was the one, after all, who had negotiated all of the team's contracts. Moe regretted the fact that The Stooges did not share in the enormous royalties from television showings of the shorts. Aside from money, he was deeply satisfied with his years as Head Stooge.

Source: Three Stooges, A Starting Point

Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy began to be re-appreciated in the 1950's with the advent of television. Their old films were played quite often; many had entered the public domain and the television stations did not have to pay royalty fees to broadcast them. Hal Roach tried to reunite the film team in the 1950's but their ages and ill health prevented the reunion. Stan Laurel was married five times and divorced four times, twice to the same woman. He had two children with his first wife Lois Neilson. Neither Stan nor Oliver Hardy ever became wealthy because they did not own their film properties, neither did they receive a percentage of the profits. Stan died from heart failure on February 23rd, 1965, but not before receiving a special Academy Award in 1960 "for his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy."

Source: GoldenSilents.com

Bob Denver/Cast of Gilligans Island, other sitcom stars of the 60s
Bill Green from Tennessee asked this about residuals: "I've heard that
casts from old shows don't get paid royalties for the reruns. Is this true?"

Bob: Unfortunately, for those of us starring in series up until the early part of the 70's,
that's very true. Our cast was paid off for reruns of Gilligan by 1968, which means
none of us has seen a penny in close to 40 years. Believe me, had we known about
mass syndication, videos, TV Land, cable, etc., we would have made better deals.
These days a successful series sets you up for life (think "Friends", "Frasier",
"Seinfeld", "ER" - the list goes on), but that wasn't true in the 60's!

Source: Ask Bob



The standard operating procedure for the Entertainment Cartels has always been to exploit new avenues of providing entertainment for profit while depriving the creators of any share.

Bottom line is that the Home Computer as an avenue for entertainment is neither owned nor controlled by the Entertainment Cartels. Just as the original artists whose work was ripped off and sold for the new medium of Television, the new medium of the PC and the vehicle for digital delivery, the Internet, were not foreseen when the original content was created. Therefore, using the Entertainment Industries own standards, they are not entitled to any compensation.

Digital media formats such as mpg, avi, flac, etc. are not controlled proprietarily and therefore hold no means for controlling content converted to those formats for private use. The original content was legally purchased and converted. The product was packaged, sold and legally aquired. The digital copy can be reproduced endlessly without any loss of quality. The sad fact for the "owners" of so-called intellectual properties is that as long as people are able to copy content, they will. As long as the means to share digital content exists, sharing will also exist. To cry foul and attempt to paint themselves as victims of theft is not only insanely hypocritical and laughably ironic, it is arguably a mere exersize in semantics. The floodgates have been opened and the freedom we enjoy can not be denied us. To attempt to create a criminal underclass of the millions of average, hardworking people who enjoy creating and sharing digital media is to deny the reality. To attempt to equate "lost sales" with the more accurate "potential lost sales" is playing a numbers game with absolutely no basis in reality. People who share files also purchase media and attend various entertainment venues. The availability of fast, free digital media whets the appetite, but does not necessarily discourage the purchase of any and all other entertainment. It does mean that the Entertainment Cartels have finally run into a new venue they will not be able to exploit for enormous windfalls as they have been able to exploit Television, CDs, DVDs, etc. in the past. It means they will actually have to work harder to exploit this new resource and actually may have to earn both their profits and our respect. The former has all too often come easily to them and the latter has all too often never been a concern for them. The worm has turned..........

[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.