One cool thing about Sweden is that it has relatively strong legal protections for freedom of speech and online privacy, especially by European standards. As a result, it’s something of a hotspot for peer-to-peer file sharing and copyright infringement. The other day, I slept in the same basement as one of the Pirate Bay admins. I felt a little bit like I was in the presence of internet royalty.
The pirates in Sweden have even created an organized political party to lobby for changes to copyright law in Sweden. Recently, the youth wing of this party, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) received around $159,000 from the government bureau tasked with giving money to youth organizations to encourage young people’s participation in politics. Ung Pirat is apparently the third largest youth political organization in Sweden, and the money is distributed according to membership.
Giving money to an organization that’s seen as encouraging illegal behavior was apparently quite controversial. I applaud the Swedish government for standing firm and applying objective standards when giving out the funds. There’s nothing wrong with advocating changes in copyright law. Plus, if your goal is to get young people interested in politics, it would be hard to find an issue closer to their hearts than file-sharing.
I actually have very mixed feelings about copyright infringement on peer-to-peer file networks. On the one hand, it’s been great for raising awareness about issues of online privacy and security. Hundreds of millions of people are doing not just something they’d rather their neighbors didn’t know about, but something they could actually be penalized for in court. That perspective makes it a lot easier for those people to sympathize with Chinese bloggers, or Iranian dissidents, for instance. File sharing has also exposed how hopelessly broken our copyright laws are. Eventually, statute will bow to status quo and some sort of sane reform will have to be implemented.
On the other hand, I do believe that it should be possible to make a living by producing creative content. Being a writer, musician or artist should not be the exclusive province of the idle rich. Copyright law may be a blunt and clumsy instrument, but it has historically made this possible. Before we do away with the entire structure of copyright, we should try to ensure that a viable alternative model is in place to compensate people for creation.
With regard to software in particular, the easy availability of pirated commercial software probably significantly hurts adoption of free software alternatives. In his well-reasoned article, Windows is Free, Dave Gutteridge points out that for many people, pirating software is so easy and so automatic they never even consider price when choosing between commercial software and free software alternatives.
I see this one going the opposite way. File sharing is done across the entire planet so no one country has the ability to set laws that will significantly affect file sharing. Furthermore, the law is pretty clear on this. You steal someone’s intellectual property, you’re going to be punished. It will be much easier for the governments of the world to agree on a policing strategy to prevent file sharing than it will be to get them to agree to overturn centuries old notions of ownership of intellectual property. As much of a free for all as the internet can be, it can also be controlled to a large extent(see kiddie porn). So my advice is to enjoy the crazy file sharing days of the internet while you can because they won’t be here for our kids.
Sweden is the worlds biggest fraud! The Swedish government is involved in robbing and killings in Africa since 1956. Swedish government is involved in the Afghan heroin-trade. Read the truth about Sweden here: http://corruptio.blogg.se