The latest chapter in the online piracy debate begins in Sweden, where new anti-piracy legislation resulted in the country’s internet traffic falling by 33%.
Sweden’s government statistics agency estimate that 8% of the entire country use peer-to-peer sharing, and it’s safe to assume that 100% of them are doing so with illegal content. That’s an incredible figure – almost one in ten Swedes have no objection to stealing.
The so-called Swedish Pirate Party is being widely quoted as saying that the drop will be temporary, and will only last as long as it takes users to change their security settings so as to remain anonymous.
Note that this is from the institution who want to “fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.”
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to reform copyright laws, but the Swedish Pirates believe that “All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized.“
I’m not going to bother tearing this to shreds. Their own words do a good job of undermining their position.
However, there are two things that irritate me.
Firstly, whenever a person starts to argue why they should be allowed to steal music or movies, they inevitably gravitate towards this being connected to their rights to privacy. Can it simply be that a person who believes theft to be justifiable is intellectually incapable of differentiating between piracy and privacy? Hint: look for the ‘V’.
The second source of irritation is an old one. Stealing is stealing. It isn’t a form of political protest, it isn’t victimless, and it isn’t right. If I steal money from a person’s car without them knowing about it, it’s still stealing. If I steal £100 from the mighty Barclays bank, it’s still stealing.
All of the companies we work with have been affected by piracy. All of them have had people using their software without paying for it, and all of them have invested considerable amounts of money and time to protect their work from pirates.
There’s nothing to argue. Whether a person has illegal software, music, movies or texts, it’s theft.
