Please see the clarification at the end.
The pirates have Sweden on the boil now. Not the modern avatars of the masked, cutlass and musket-wielding variety who operate off the Somali coast but those from the virtual world who are churning up the seas for the behemoth recording and film industry. On 17 April, three young men and a middle-aged businessman, all Swedes, were sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay a fine of 30 million kroner (approximately $3.62 million) after a short trial that had the country rivetted.
The three young men, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, are founders of The Pirate Bay, the hugely popular file-sharing website, while businessman Carl Lundstrom is their financier. They were found guilty of abetting copyright infringement, not infringing it themselves, through their BitTorrent tracking website which allowed users to share and download music, movies, games and videos. Yes, we’ve had Napster, Gnutella, Grokster, eDonkey and Kazaa before, all of which the US government has managed to shut down, so what’s new? It’s the Swedish reaction to the case. The Swedes, it turns out, do not like undue interference with Internet freedom and they are angry.
The Pirate Bay, a mega-site with an estimated 25 million users, is Swedish and its founding members are popular, almost iconic figures who represent a philosophy and an increasingly attractive political movement that has worldwide support. Although the site is still up and running — after the first raid on Pirate Bay in May 2006, the servers were moved to hidden locations in Europe — the sentence has outraged the universe of file-sharers. Rallies, that started outside the courtroom in Stockholm when the trial began, have spread to other cities and countries. In neighbouring Norway, the socialist party Red has launched a global Internet campaign that will continue till May 1. In Russia, street protests have marked the verdict.
The court’s justification is that Pirate Bay, by providing “well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the website, have incited the crimes that the file-sharers have committed”. The other was the revenues that the website is said to have earned. The main plaintiff, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), alleged that Pirate Bay was not just a file-sharing hub but a commercial operation that brought in an annual revenue exceeding $3 million from the advertisements that were featured on the site. The operators have denied this vehemently, saying the cost of their expensive hardware and bandwidth, funded by Lundstrom, gave them little profit.
Industry naturally is delighted by the verdict. John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of IFPI, hailed it as “good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will be protected by law.” This would have been credible if a large number of musicians and authors had not come out in support of Pirate Bay, which, cheekily, continues its services.
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The legal course of the case promises to be interesting because the latest reports say the judge in the trial has been found to have links to two lobbies campaigning for copyright protection, groups that include representatives of the plaintiffs. Well, well, well. But infinitely more interesting is the fallout of the case on the global movement against the stifling hold of industry giants on copyrights and against the current patent regime in general. A victory of sorts has already been notched up with Sweden’s Pirate Party, a separate organisation formed in January 2006 as an offshoot of Pirate Bay, riding the crest of a popularity that might catapult it into the European Parliament in Strasbourg during the June elections.
Within hours of the Pirate Bay verdict, the Pirate Party, a political movement that has been struggling for momentum to fight restrictive intellectual property rights, found its ranks had swollen by 3,000. At the end of the week it had gone up by another 19,000, taking the total membership to 37,000 and making it the fourth-largest party in Sweden. The Pirate Party has a simple three-point agenda: It wants reform of the copyright law so that there is balance between the rights of the holder and the spread of knowledge and creativity; abolition of the patent system and strengthening the individual’s right to privacy, in everyday life and on the Net.
Its ideology has already got a resounding vote from the country’s Internet service providers. All of them have refused to block access to Pirate Bay. Censorship, they have just declared, is not their job and they will not be party to anything that violates the principle of a free and open internet.
Hurrah for the Swedes, pirates and all.
Clarification
Gnutella wasn't shut down, as stated in the column. The error is regretted.