“Back to start..”:https://www.lasseman.se
*Yarr! Swedish Pirates – what’s the fuss?*
To clarify and to shed some light on why the issue of piracy has become so big lately in swedish media it is mainly because of the recent raids made by an organisation who calls themselves “The Anti-Piracy Bureau”. Now this is an organisation that has nothing to do with the Swedish goverment or has any special legal privileges. They’re simply a lobby organisation representing big entertainment labels. This makes it even more strange when they seemingly get the swedish police to follow their lead.. APB have even appeared on-site when a raid has gone down. There was also supposedly (never saw it myself) a link from the homepage of the police, telling people to report piracy to APB instead of them.
You need to know that it is currently _not_ illegal for swedish citizens to download media such as mp3s or xvid/divx movies. It _is_ however illegal to distribute them. We also have the “cassette law” which means you are allowed to make copies of your bought movies or music and share it with a limited circle of friends, non-profit of course. In order to make up for the loss of profit for movie and music makers Sweden (as well as other countries?) have a special tax on recordable media such as DVDR/CDR. Yes. We swedes love em taxes..
*Sweden* has very solid laws protecting the individual from the eyes of big brother. For instance it is currently _not_ legal to monitor an IP-adress for the sole reason there “might” be some piracy going on. And the ISP certainly doesn’t have to turn in any records. The police could, with substantial evidence backing them up, get the permission to do this – but it is quite rare and it’s quite low on their long list of priorities (child pornography for instance is more of an important subject).
The Anti-Piracy Bureau, let’s just call them APB from now on have however monitored users IP adresses and their actions online and even, in true cowboy style, sent out letters telling people to stop their illegal downloading. Now this has led to nothing but.. oh well.. around 5000 complaints to swedish authorities whom are now looking into exactly what APB are up to. Legal charges have also been drawn up against APB, but none have been issued so far to my knowledge.
*The raids* have been against induvidual filesharers as well as the ISP Bahnhof. Recently two filesharers from Malmo in the south of Sweden were released since the punishment for their.. crimes.. would have been to low.
The hunt of filesharers and what started out as a seemlingy atleast semi-effective scare from APB is now, in my humble opinion, backfiring. And backfiring good. The swedish political party “Centern”:http://www.centerpartiet.se today followed the line which “Piratbyran”:http://www.piratbyran.org (a small organisation claiming to be the counter-part to APB) presented to them in a hearing where “IFPI”:http://www.ifpi.org/ , representatives from the record industry also took part in. More of this can be found “in swedish right here”:http://www.piratbyran.org/index.php?view=forum&a=thread&id=24408
The hearing was about whether or not the Center party would vote yes or no regarding to the new delegalization of downloading copyright protected music & movies. In short, the Center parties representatives got buck naked and gave IFPI the finger while in joy exclaiming _downloads for all biatches!_.
Ok so that’s not what happened but they agreed that they could not make millions of swedes criminals (which would happen if these new laws passed, since we are quite the active leechers) and for that reason decided to vote no to the new law. “Want to know about how the goverment in Sweden works?”:http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/2856
Many popular evening newspapers such as “Expressen”:http://www.expressen.se are also behind the people ( = our population – greedy bitches) who does not want the new “no-download-law” to pass. “Today their editorial (swe)”:http://www.expressen.se/index.jsp?a=256482 had the title “Download!” calling out people to keep doing just that. Furthermore it’s worth to mention that it’s not exactly unusual to find guides in our big newspapers describing how to download shit off the net. For instance I read a funny editorial from the guy in charge of the entertainment section of “Sundsvalls Tidning”:http://www.st.nu where he went on and on about how sweet it was that Sopranos would get back on air in the US again so he could finally go home and download some new episodes. Not being shy there are we Johnny boy..
We have also seen In recent swedish media both Jens of Sweden, the maker of popular MP3 players and Jonas Birgersson, vice president of broadband company Bredband 2, delivering “hard criticism towards APB”:http://www.jensofsweden.com/media/company/press_jo_20040315_eng.pdf
Something new seems to slip out almost every day about where all of this is going. It will be interesting to see if the new laws, making downloading mp3s and movies illegal in Sweden, will pass and as planned come into action in july this year.
Personally I don’t care because music and movies are just distractions from polishing my weaponry for the easter coming up. Tradition in sweden is for kids to dress up as witches and go out begging for candy. “I got some candy for em alright”:view.php?image=witch.jpg
*Slashdotted*
Weow. MySQL crashed in like 2 seconds once someone posted my site to “Slashdot”:http://www.slashdot.org .. seems the mysql_max_connections hit the roof pretty much instantly :] Anways it seems to have cooled down now and I threw away (moved actually..) the temporary page I had to put up. I’m still getting a good 5-600 hits / hour.
I’m annoyed by the fact that a Google with the language setting set to swedish (for text & messages) will rank my site way much lower than a Google with english text and messages set. This shouldn’t matter unless you set Google to search for a specific lang. Gragh.
*I’ve been reading various articles* on “IDG Sweden”:http://www.idg.se where they talk about the problem of Piracy. “One guy”:http://www.idg.se/ArticlePages/200503/17/20050317160805_IDG.se036/20050317160805_IDG.se036.dbp.asp thought that our minister of justice should make an example and bust some filesharers and put his foot down. That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. Look how well it’s working out around the world. Oh what it isn’t? No shit. You need laws that support the individuals as well as the organisations – but no fucking examples need to be made. Scare tactics ain’t the way to go but better buissnes models from the music and movie industry is. But this is hardly news and should be quite obvious by now.
Pop stars will sooner or later have to find themselves without their ridiculous wages and as everything digital leaps forward, so will the movie industry and effects, virtual sets, etc that today cost millions will drop to a couple of thousand and become more or less streamlined.
*In other awesome news*
“Trekunited”:http://trekunited.com/ is reporting that they are making progress and are still calling for arms. Well I feel obliged to mention them since I do enjoy the show. However I’m holding off on watching the latest episodes until I know if it’s gonna stay on or not.