Reflections on P2P Revolution

Steal This Film!

2006-08-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

A Swedish pro-piracy documentarist group calling itself The League of Noble Peers has just released a 32 minute long video titled Steal This Film!. The documentary is available in iPod, standard (.mov) and DVD formats.

On the video the various insiders of the Swedish pirate movement talk about how piracy evolved into a national hobby and a political movement in Sweden. The guys who founded and are running Pirate Bay give their own personal accounts on the May 31 raid. Their interviews give insight into how determined they are in promoting the pirate agenda, above all as a free speech issue. Many common Swedish filesharers are interviewed as well. Their fearless, open, consumer-style approach into piracy issues and services can be an eye-opener for many non-Swedes on how far things have really advanced in the social climate of this high-tech nation of 9 million people. There is no way Hollywood lobbyists can regain a hold on these people's minds. They all consider it given that free filesharing is here to stay and show tangible defiance against any outside pressuring on their filesharing habits.

In the true spirit of piracy, the document borrows freely material from different Hollywood movies and propaganda advertisements, combining it to the fresh interview material. The League of Noble Peers is working on continuation to this document.

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

2006-06-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

"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.

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Why a broadband tax is a bad idea to solve the p2p dilemma

2006-06-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

Public debate on filesharing continues in Sweden. The idea of a broadband tax as a way to collect money to copyright holders has received a cautious positive response from several parties who have lately turned from anti-filesharers into pro-filesharers at the face of the scary approach of the Swedish Pirates towards the Swedish Parliament.

Newspaper Expressen opposes the new proposed tax in no unclear terms. Here's what they say in their 10.6.2006 editorial:

"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."

I agree with them totally. Internet must remain as affordable as possible, as available as possible, as lightweigtht as possible. It is a new era communication platform that operates on fast, free global connectivity. Its gracious neutrality regarding the content it carries is what makes it such a powerful cultural accelerator. Content can evolve freely, new file formats and new communication protocols can emerge freely - Internet will handle them all just fine because it was designed to be universal.

Internet does not have favorites. For the Internet, movie industry's bits - whether paid for or pirated - are just bits among others - its job is to deliver them all from the sender to the receiver, quickly and reliably, period. The idea of some particular content business suffering so much of the existence of this superb neutral communication infrastructure that it would earn a special permanent priviledge to tax all communication on Internet is ridiculous.

Businesses that cannot survive free Internet do not deserve to survive. They must reform, restructure or die. True creativity will never be threatened by free communication. And there will always be new, smarter, more visionary businessmen who can set up new businesses - even content businesses - that are fit enough to survive the Internet.

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What happens when a million filesharers come out of the closet?

2006-06-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

What happens when a nation like Sweden decides to allow filesharing for its citizens? No more fear of police or copyright cartels harassing you because of filesharing. Freedom to share as much as you want, to download as much as you want, as fast as your broadband connection can deliver. And should somebody dare to harass you because of what you are doing, he would be committing a crime.

What happens when the fear factor is removed from filesharing? Well, for starters, the filesharers will come out of the closet.

In this case a million of them. Or perhaps two, because nobody really knows. People don’t advertise these things in public. But now that it will be legal and acceptable, they will of course advertise it. And they will be proud of it. That’s what coming out of the closet does to people.

And then they can start doing some amazing things together.

Like building the world’s finest Library of Culture. Do the Swedish filesharers have the resources for it? Yes, they have a million computers, hundreds of petabytes of collective storage space and a world class broadband network. Do they have the skills to do it? Yes, they are the most advanced filesharing nation on the planet in a well-educated high-tech country. Do they have the motivation to do it? Oh yes - actually they have been doing it already for a long time. They just had to keep all their treasures in that closet of fear. But now, coming out of the closet, they can bring their treasures out as well, and the Library of Culture can open.

It will be a little messy and disorganized in the beginning, of course. But the collection will be breathtaking from the first day. And it won’t take long until it all gets better organized and sorted out, and complete high-quality discographies and filmographies will start to show up. Expert collections of rarities will be available. And all the new popular items will of course be available right after their release in any required quantity as high-speed torrents. Sounds like God meant online libraries to be?

When the Swedes will have their Culture Library running, the world cannot avoid hearing about it. There will be many foreigners curious to visit the place. And the Swedes won’t mind, they will welcome the foreign visitors. But for you as a foreigner there might be one slight problem. It might be that your government has made it a crime for you to visit such a library. They might even have forced you to use your local mall instead to satisfy all your cultural needs.

So if there is a legal problem in your country about visiting fine foreign libraries, think twice before you go and have a curious peek at the Swedish one. You just might be tempted to commit a crime.

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Even Hilary does not believe in suing your customers anymore

2006-06-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

Hilary Rosen, the ex-chairwoman of the RIAA and a much-hated character during the Napster's heyday, expresses her concern over the RIAA's present suing campaigns targeting individual p2p users in her recent blog entry. She does not seem to believe in DRM either, although leaves the elaboration of that theme to a later time.

I see no reason to doubt the honesty of her opinions expressed as a private person. Professional executives like her are like mercenaries - resourceful, determined and efficient in their jobs even if they had moral doubts about what they are doing. As long as they are paid, they will do it anyway, and there are plenty of them on the market for the media cartels to choose from.

The filesharers, on the other hand, are just private people with little or no experience of serious things like civil courts, lobbying and doing PR in the media. When faced with the professional 'killers' of the media cartels they are totally helpless and seldom see any other choices than to surrender on the spot, trying to gather together whatever loots the mercenaries demand from them. This applies today to almost the whole planet, Sweden being perhaps the only area on the globe where the odds are more even, thanks to the rising political movement of the Swedish pirates.

Despite the gloomy situation we have today, the long term prospects of the media cartels to keep up their empire are less rosy. What is happening in Sweden today will be happening in other countries within a few years. People are questioning the media cartel propaganda on a deeper level; they are starting to see things in a wider context. They are starting to see the invisible strings of control and corruption that have caused their own elected legislators to write such cartel-friendly copyright laws. They are starting to realize that the democratic mechanisms are not quite dead yet, despite the apparent depressing hegemony of corporations over the political decision-makers. If the Swedish pirates can succesfully defy their copyright laws and make a run to their parliament to rewrite the bad laws, why could it not happen elsewhere too? Why not, indeed.

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