Online copyright showdown as studios take on ‘pirate paradise'

SWEDEN: From Tom Sullivan in Stockholm

WHEN SWEDISH politicians launched ambitious plans to increase internet access in the 1990s, creating a haven for online piracy was probably the last thing on their minds. Yet today almost every household has high-speed broadband and the country is a world leader in the illegal downloading of music and films.

That alone would have been enough to attract the ire of a global entertainment industry fighting tooth and nail to win back lost revenues. The fact Sweden is also home to The Pirate Bay - one of the most successful and brazen file-sharing networks - virtually guaranteed it.

"The Pirate Bay has 25 million users worldwide. Sweden has become a pirate paradise," says Monique Wadsted, the lawyer representing the US film industry in a £10 million criminal damages case which starts tomorrow. "At the moment this country is seen as a copyright haven. Hopefully the pirates will be jailed. It's important to send out a clear signal that it's not acceptable to have a big illegal copying factory on Swedish territory."

advertisementThe website founders are facing compensation claims from film and music studios including Warner Bros, Fox Movies, Sony Music and EMI. They are accused of conspiring to breach the copyright of films and music such as Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire and The Beatles' album Let It Be.

They deny the charges, arguing their site does not contain downloads, but uses "BitTorrent" software which points users towards bits of files on millions of computers. The Pirate Bay's co-founder, Fredrik Neij, calls the site "the world's biggest distributor of culture and media", a claim met with little scepticism in Sweden, which has a long tradition of open access to information.

According to surveys, 85% of 18 to 24-year-olds in Sweden regularly download music and films. The youth section of the Pirate Party, which lobbies for copyright reform, claims it is the third-largest youth movement in the country and recently received a sizeable government grant.

"About 1.5 million people download files illegally in Sweden and the media tends to treat the issue as an interesting debate rather than a crime. It is also seen as an intellectual movement defending the free flow of culture over the internet," said Sam Sundberg, author of the recent book, Piraterna (The Pirates).

Just mentioning The Pirate Bay raises the hackles of music executives, said Daniel Johansson, an analyst at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology. This is partly due to the way the activists taunt the industry, posting insulting replies to legal threats on their website and holding lectures titled How To Dismantle A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry As A Hobby.

And dismantling the industry is what they are doing, added Johansson. "The pirates have created new behaviour on the internet and the music industry is stuck in the old way of doing things. The biggest challenge is to get away from selling copies and to start selling access to online music."

However, some see the showdown as part of a larger struggle for control of the internet.

"To find out whether people are downloading copyrighted material you need control and to sift through all communications on the internet," said Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party. "This is a fight over who controls knowledge and culture - the public or corporations. You have a few old structures that have traditionally controlled access to culture and their power is being taken away by new technology. This is a fight they cannot win."

The corporations claim the pirates want a lawless internet.

Wadsted said: "The pirates' ideology is that the internet is their space and that they can do as they like with it. But that's not the case. The whole of society is online and you can't have a different set of rules there to everywhere else."

The Pirate Bay claims more than a third of all films and music downloaded via its website are physically located in China, and its supporters say other sites can open anywhere if it is shut down.

"Whatever happens, it won't have any effect on downloading," said Sundberg. "But if the industry wins it will boost support for the pirates."

15 February 2009