Sweden Piracy law gives IP addresses to Copyright Holders
I learned today from Total Format that Sweden is attempting to put an end to piracy – specifically peer-to-peer networks. The editor, Detomah, mentioned how Sweden has a very large piracy community (roughly 8% of the population), and The Pirate Bay is actually based in Sweden.
Basically, this new law allows copyright holders to approach Internet service providers (ISP’s) to obtain IP Addresses of illegal downloaders of their content. While the risks of getting caught are still low, it created a serious impact already – minimizing internet traffic by 30% since the laws creation.
The thing is there is a lot more to pirating than simply The Pirate Bay. You have Limewire, FTP, email, Mininova, BTjunkie, torrentz, and much more in order to send stuff out.
So its illegal to steal in a store – why not online? The major problem with file sharing isn’t hurting the pockets of the musicians. It hurting the pockets of those “behind” the scenes. Its hurting the music publishers, art designers, marketers, music engravers, manufacturers, and more.
So what’s my thoughts on this? Well, I think Piracy can be a good thing. The understanding is that when things get passed around its a free form of advertisement. Consider it a loss-leader. Losing money on the sale of music commonly leads to other venues of creating revenue (like merchandise and concert tickets), and sometime even builds a community much quicker. The reason for this is simple – today’s word of mouth is on steroids. We no longer tell one person, we now tell the whole world through our social networks.
At least this is the idea behind music. Things change when you get involved with film – because if you steal Star Wars Episode IV, then your probably not going to run out and watch the movie at your local theater (you MAY however, become a hardcore Star Wars fan and start buying all the action figures). But granted there’s never ANYTHING such as a free lunch – ever. Stealing hurts people, whether its for the long run or the short run. So as someone who gives his music away, what’s my conclusion? Well, to be honest, I don’t know – and that’s scary. Because for music it has made sense, but for the entertainment industry things get cloudy 
So what’s your thoughts on this?
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
I agree with a lot of what you’ve been saying.
People who use the sites that you mentioned are pretty dumb anyway. It’s incredibly easy to find out who’s stealing what. 1 Find a popular torrent that has lots of activity 2 download the torrent 3 open the torrent in a client 4 find the place where you’re connecting to peers in the client 5 copy their IP adress 6 enter it into google and Vwallah! You know exactly where the said thief lives.
Yes, Piracy can be a good thing. What’s bad is that for every “pirate” there are ten others who share/distribute their music onto other people’s computers/mp3 players.
The only solution i can think of that wouldn’t hurt everything too much would be to close down all public trackers (like the ones you’ve mentioned) there are plenty of private trackers and the people who are members in the private trackers would be able to help/publicize a certain band/movie around just as much as if it were on a public tracker, while convincing the people who use public trackers to buy the album/movie. There is no easy solution you’re right.
Leave your response!