[Piracy] - The other side

The debate surrounding internet piracy’s be or not to be is raging all over the world. But the focus of this debate has allways been on the filesharers and not the organisations that are trying to stop them. The reason for this is because the whole debate is orchestrated by the organisations themselves. I think it’s frightening how much of a witchhunt this whole deal has become and the ignorance those in power are displaying. Private corporations are throwing money at polititians in order to reserve the right to persecute filesharers that disturb their mindset.

The examples of this are many but the most scandalous I can think of is the bust on Pirate Bay’s servers. In mars 22 2006 a letter from the american lobby organisation MPA was recieved by the swedish government. MPA demanded that the filesharing site Pirate Bay had to be shut down. If this was not done, MPA threatened to perform sanctions within the frame of WTO against Sweden. In the 10:th of april, Sweden’s answer came. They agreed to do anything in their power to stop the site. The bust realized on 31:st of May, the servers hosting Pirate Bay and the site Piratbyrån along with numerous other unrelated sites were confiscated. The discontent spread rapidly throughout Sweden. Whithin 24 hours, the Pirate Party had recieved 2000 new members. When the chock had settled, rumours began spreading that the american government was really behind the bust. Thomas Bodström, at that time minister of justice, lied and answered that he never had any contact with USA regarding the bust, they where not involved at all. But then SVT began investigating the events and the whole story was unveiled for the people to see.

How can something like this happen? How can a private foreign organisation tell Sweden’s government what to do? Things like these leads me to question Swedens sovereinty, I mean are we really a nation if we don’t controll it ourselves? Had the public had their say on this question, the servers would never have been confiscated. Even people within the government had their doubts about the bust and warned that a convicting sentence would be hard to get against a Bittorrent index site since there is nothing illegal going on. Yet Bodström still persisted.

I feel that the discussion about filesharing should be viewed from all sides and get the priority the people demands, not private lobby organisations. If not, we won’t be a democratic nation anymore but a nation run by Microsoft, Sony and the rest of the greedy corporations...

SVT:s discovery