Of course it bothers me with the slippery slope that is the surveillance legislation orgie, but this story and my comment is not on those issues.

I'm already a Pirate Party member.

What I realize is that continuing to fileshare copyrighted works is COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE to the cause.

By the way, I really am Swedish.

I fail to see your point. Downloading stuff that the authors seems to completely hate you for is somehow Freedom?

No. That's a childish approach. With freedom comes responsibility. Now, I think the industry is behaving like a rabies dog but they're within their rights to disallow us to copy their material without giving them a krona.

Freedom is to being able to NOT BUY INTO THEIR SHIT. Accept their rules since it's in fact codified, but refuse to participate in transactions with them unless you're offered a FAIR DEAL and things YOU ACTUALLY WANT.

I, and I bet many others with me, don't think it's fun anymore. While a good many proceeds to download songs, movies and TV series using other protocols than e.g. torrents, there are those that recognize that it's not a sustainable situation. I stopped downloading questionable material the 31st of March.

Legislation will get worse and worse to the point where we are all under constant surveillance. We don't need to give "them" any more leverage to these draconian laws. We are in our right to fileshare on a personal level - that is, with friends and family. Let's stop filesharing with "strangers" and we're untouchable.

There's a huge discussion on obfuscation techniques and VPN solutions for consumers -- they're ignoring the upcoming EU directive on mandatory requirement to keep logs. Ergo, when anonymisation services keep logs, you're no longer anonymous.

I for one have "given up" my habits completely. I play by the rules set by the industry. If they cannot offer me what I want (unencumbered digital music), then I simply do not buy from them.

I also enjoy Spotify a great bit - the only thing I really miss is a service that lets me download TV series.

Lastly, the only torrents you'll see on my system is OSS like Debian and Ubuntu ISO:s.

(Yes, I am Swedish.)

Gee, I wonder if

1) there's a difference between lawyers in court and citizens outside of court speaking their mind -- clearly they're equivalent!

2) there's a difference between laws of the United States of America and the Kingdom of Sweden -- clearly, these Swedish judges should not tolerate disrespectful attitudes towards American law!

OK. I'm laughing:

Did you not understand that this trial is a Swedish trial? American law actually is a joke until it's applicable in Sweden.

The prosecution was caught red-handed both 4th and 5th day and the defense once again protested this method of trying to throw the defendants off guard with new material, saying things such as "you've done this all week -- have you not learned anything at all?" and "this is starting to look like an American movie trial -- we request you hand over ALL material NOW".

The court took a break for discussions. After 10 minutes the court informs the prosecution that they must hand over any material they have not already handed over and which they wish to use in their case. The prosecution, specifically Danowski, acts like a 5-year-old and says "but.. the problem, your Honor, is that I don't know if it's necessary, so.. [I wish not to, is the meaning of this]", which the court immediately smacks down with "the meaning of the court's decision is that all material, any material, not presented to the defense, that you wish to use, must be handed over NOW".

The prosecution clearly was very disappointed that they weren't allowed to play cowboys in court.

The prosecution also tried to snare Peter Sunde with a lot of documents found on the web.. Danowski tried to make it look like Peter Sunde had said things he hadn't said with the help of [ square brackets! ] which Peter Sunde kindly informed is a way to insert 3rd party information, or reflection, on a quote. The prosecution is going about with rather dirty tactics.

Prosecution lawyer Monique Wadsted questions Carl Lundstrom, pleading not guilty and having nothing to do with TPB, calling TPB illegal, trying to have him label it as illegal as well. The defense protests, luckily. Got damn industry lawyers...

The future of file-sharing will be just like the old days, only better!

While it's nice with torrent sites and all, it enables anyone to see who's downloading and uploading what on a single torrent. This clearly is the approach copyright holders are going to take in Sweden.

Now, I agree that the artists should be able to make money. Just not these silly amounts they dream of! The cost of creative works is declining every day with the availability of the heaps of content already available from many decades and even centuries. "New" is a thing fewer and fewer appreciate when faced with all this other older, great, music.

In the older days, we could not lay our hands on that content. Come Internet, the market completely changed. (Thinking of the "Long tail"-concept. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Revised-Updated-Business/dp/1401309666/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234693596&sr=8-1)

Hey, we've got at least 16 gigabytes of USB thumb drives! It will be just like passing dope in the hallways. It's insane, the amounts of data easily transferable from friend to friend. Kill Internet file-sharing and see the music market stagnate because no one is buying shit they didn't even hear about. New single-album-artists will take decades to market!

Meanwhile, real artists with real skill will sell as they always has been. They won't be making millions off records or digital copies, but will have to lift their asses to go touring and give the consumers something they are willing to pay for.

Bye bye Karma

The Committee on Legal Affairs says in the report labeled "REPORT on the outlook for copyright in the EU":

This is from (PDF-warning) http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A6-2009-0017+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN

Which in my view is equivalent to judge The Pirate Bay without any legal trial. It's not some hippie committee on agriculture or whatever. Writing like this just shows they've already made up their mind before trial. Mind you, I realize this is an EU committee, but in case you haven't noticed, Sweden has been following the EU's advice quite throroughly lately.

This trial is guaranteed to be unfair even from the start. The EU has released the so called Medina report, already judging the defendants as guilty. The report was issued several weeks ago. This way the judges already know how to judge these individuals, so things are kept simple!

I guess this trial will mean that linking to copyright infringing material will be illegal. Possibly they will make it so it will be illegal if there's an intent which of course will be all the battle.

It's time to vote for the Pirate Party.

More info:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MedinaOrtega_INI-report-Copyright_JURI-consolidated
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/copyright-dogmatism-ridiculously-strikes-european-parliament

Greetings from a sad Swede

Why do people care who runs GNU/Linux and who does not? GNU/Linux marketshare is abysmal and still the community is pulling in support from hardware and software vendors, which is great!

What I don't get is this whole "PLEASE RUN LINUX!"-shit. Who cares? So, run Mac OS or Windows, good on ya. As long as we've got open standards, it doesn't make any difference at all what operating system you run on your computer. Frankly, it's mostly boring, in the end.

GNU/Linux is a CHOICE and that's enough for me.

What is happening with the world? Seriously..?

It seems the politicians are just having a nervous BREAKDOWN all over the place. If it's not about increasing surveillance, it's fighting terrorism, increasing copyright timespan and frankly, just about anything that's NOT BENEFICIAL OF CITIZENS AT ALL.

I'm so tired of all this. I was seriously thinking of giving up the fighting but instead I joined the Pirate Party (Sweden). They push their core ideas such as integrity, freedom of expression and freedom to fileshare copyrighted works (that one I don't care that much about).

I absolutely have lost interest of the politics concerning e.g. healthcare, economics, welfare, defense, infrastructure and what have you. I'm 100% focused on the integrity issues - because, if we have no private life, what the fuck do we have exactly?

Each and every one party in Sweden is pushing their agenda on the surveillance except for the Pirate Party which is non-negotiably against. Parties traditionally very concerned with integrity issues have been completely HIJACKED and are now pro-surveillance. Just the past year Sweden is about to:
1) Let the state wiretap the entire country (with un-supportable claims that this will only be done to connections crossing the border)
2) Give copyright-holders the privilege to ask an ISP for the identity behind an IP-address (what the FUCK? Swedish RIIA)
3) Implement the EU directive to store traffic data (SMS, MMS, E-mail, web, telephone, cellphone) at the very least 6 months. By the way, this includes position data - now everyone carrying a cellphone can be tracked (at least 6 months back - do you remember where you were 6 months back??). Brilliant! Swedish politicians wants to go further than this and require 1-2 years of storage.

I've had it. The politicians are so fucking ignorant that I just want to vomit. This state is in a state of hijack and it's fucking time to revolt. The Pirate Party is gaining voters.

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.

This whole surveillance thing makes me queasy. I cannot for the life of me begin to understand the politicians reasoning for fucking up this (past) democracy like this. :-((