Just joined the Danish pirate party

Posted on | May 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

I just joined the Danish pirate party, Piratpartiet, an equivalant to the Swedish pirate party, which has now grown to more than 44,000 members, fuelled especially by the so-called ‘spectrial‘-verdict (The Pirate Bay trial in which they were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement).

While the Danish party is still relatively small (I believe they have around 1,400 members as of yesterday), the Swedish pirate party has within three weeks grown immensely, making it the third largest political party in Sweden, succeeded only by Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party – although at current growth rate, the pirate party will most likely overtake the latter in near future and move into second place. The Swedish pirate party is hoping to obtain one or more seats in the European Parliament at the election on June 6.

Both the Swedish and the Danish pirate parties share a principle program (the Danish program is a translated version of the Swedish, with only a few adjustments to fit into Danish law) and is dedicated solely to engaging in issues concerning the protection of integrity and privacy, criticism of current copyright and patent legislation and the free movement of culture and knowledge. Thus, to ensure unity and consent among all its members, despite their general political stance, the party will refrain from participating in any political issue that is not related to these abovementioned issues.

Visit the Danish pirate party website here (in Danish) – and the Swedish here (mostly in Swedish).

Gee, I wish there was a way I could do less with my music, maybe someone is offering that product today

Posted on | May 3, 2009 | No Comments

Cory Doctorow, author and web-savvyness extraordinaire, came up with the most dead-on one liner about the ridiculousness of the concept of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection of online content, when he recently appeared before an audience of book publishers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference:

“No one woke up this morning and thought: Gee, I wish there was a way I could do less with my music, maybe someone’s offering that product today.”

Read the entire clip and watch the video on the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) blog.

Piracy – the result of a market failure

Posted on | April 24, 2009 | 2 Comments

If you have just the slightest interest in the heated debate about filesharing and torrents going on right now, you should read the brilliant piece author Matt Mason (of the book The Pirate Dilemma fame – a truly eye opening book about the topic) has written for the TorrentFreak blog, adressing not only The Pirate Bay ‘spectrial‘, but filesharing in general.

Here’s an excerpt:

The real winners won’t be the ones that come out on top of this long, bitter trial process, appeals and all, which could take five years. It will be the side that develops the new technologies that will render that court decision meaningless before it is even issued. They may be Scandinavian pirates or Hollywood privateers, or some combination of thereof. The file-sharing community is working ten times harder because of this trial. The entertainment industries would be wise to do the same, and wiser to find ways to work with the pirates they continue to fight. The fact that they didn’t do so ten years ago cost a generation of artists billions.

Read the whole piece here: Why Everybody Lost The Pirate Trial

The Pirate Bay trial invalid? (translation of Swedish article)

Posted on | April 23, 2009 | 17 Comments

Just a couple of hour ago, this breaking news article was published on the webpage of SR (Swedish National Radio). It unveils how the judge of the The Pirate Bay spectrial is actually an active member of the Swedish copyright lobby.

As no English media has picked up the story yet, I have made a rough translation from Swedish. As I am not entirely fluent in Swedish (I am Danish), there are a few words that still needs translation (marked in red paranthesis below). If anyone can help, email me at editor@autofunk.dk/freeform101_web and I will adjust the translation accordingly. (Update: All missing translations now ammended, thanks to Christa and Anders Olsen on email – as well as to Finnswede, Henrik M, gs ao. in the comments).
Also, any better formulation/translation of any part of the article will be appreciated.

“TRIAL MAY NEED TO BE DONE OVER”

This Friday all four founders of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to one year in prison and paying approx. 30 million Swedish Kronor in compensation and damages. But now an examination by Swedish radio P3 Nyheter (P3 News) shows that the judge in the trial may not be impartial. And the trial may need to be made over.
“I think that the judge should have chosen not to take the case. It is definitely a delicate conflict of interests,” says law attorney Leif Silbersky.

Through examination it turns out and there are relations between the judge in The Pirate Bay-trial and prosecution; meaning the film and music industry and their attorneys.

Swedish Association for Copyright (SFU)
Here the judge is a private member. Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted that represent the copyright owners in The Pirate Bay trial are also members. The association writes on its homepage that they are “a meeting spot for qualified copyright discussions”.

Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection (SFIR)
The association deals with questions of patent and industrial design rights, but has also worked in favor of stronger copyrights. Here the judge is a member of the board.

Stiftelsen.se
An extra job that the judge fills alongside his work as a council member in the ‘Tingsretten’ (Court of Property).
“It may be necessary to for the trial to be done over again,” says Leif Silbersky. “But in order for that to happen the attorneys must deal with this immediately.”

Criticism from various sides
We have talked to several experts such as professors in law practices, judges in Högsta Domstolen (Supreme Court) and lecturers of justice.
“I would not have taken this case, if I had been in this situation,” says Justitieombudsmannen (Ombudsman of Justice) Rune Lavin.
“It is obvious that he never should have taken this count,” a professor in law practice, that chooses to remain anonymous.

Judges must not have any reason to be deemed partial
There are different types of bias. The most obvious case is if a judge is related to one of the inflicted parties. This is not the case here. But the concept of ‘delikatessjäv’ (conflict of interest) exists, and that means that you as a judge must not have any reason to be deemed partial.
“But I do not think that I can be deemed partial because of these engagements,” says Tomas Norström, judge in The Pirate Bay trial.

How do you explain that several law experts disagree with you?
“You will have to ask them that yourselv. Every time I am presented with a count, I access if I see myself as partial. That I have not in this case,” says Tomas Norström.
But it does not matter what the judges thinks himself. This thinks Erik Bylander, associate professor in law practice at the Gothenburg Business College.
“Regardless of the judge’s viewpoint, it can seem highly questionable. In a high profile lawsuit such as this one, I am surprised that the court has not been more careful,” he says.

Read the original article in Swedish here.

Update:
English versions starting to pop up: thelocal.se, TorrentFreak, Open Rights Group and innumerous others.
Danish versions starting to pop up: epn.dk/Politiken.

Update:
Just got ping-backs from Boing Boing, and many others: myReport/Funkyzine, The Art of Foo, Nerdcore, Out Of My Mind, Random Media, Bloginfo360.net, Sofa King Lame, Lab For Culture, The New Blog Times, Topics About Swedish…and counting.

Swedish repercussions

Posted on | April 18, 2009 | No Comments

Following the announcement of the verdict in the trial against The Pirate Bay (the so-called ‘spectrial‘) yesterday, the web has been buzzing with reactions. For one, the Swedish Pirate Party gained more than 3,000 Swedish members in just 7 hours, with a huge amount of people from around the world asking whether they could join too. This makes the Pirate Party the fifth biggest party in Sweden, and their youth department soon to be the biggest in the country; according to a survey, more than half of the male Swedish population under 30 is considering putting their vote in the Pirate Party pool.

Slashdot is one of many sources writing about this – check out their entry.

The ‘spectrial‘ is not the only Swedish copyright-related issue being discussed right now. Also their newly imposed digital surveillance bill, the IPRED (The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive), effective of April 1, is causing heavy opposition (it basically gives authorities the right to tap into any digital communication crossing Swedish soil, airspace and web-channels). One example of the hard opposition is an act by Swedish internet provider, Bahnhof, which has started deleting it’s members’ identification information, in order to secure their privacy. With the IPRED act, these informations could be legally retrieved by the authorities, and as a result, Bahnhof sees no other alternative than deleting them. Read the Slash-dot piece.

The Pirate Bay announced guilty

Posted on | April 17, 2009 | No Comments

Minutes ago the official ‘spectrial‘-verdict of the Swedish Court was announced, and rules in favor of the prosecution. The four accused TBP-founders have all been sentenced to 1 year in prison.
A couple of hours ago, however, Peter Sunde – spokesman for The Pirate Bay (TPB) and one of the founders on trial – tweeted after the first rumour from the court was leaked: “Stay calm – Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing what so ever. This is just a theater for the media.”

As such, the verdict will – of course – be appealed.

Read this Torrentfreak article.

Rev Billy in Wall Street Journal

Posted on | April 17, 2009 | No Comments

Things are surely a-changing in this time of financial apocalypse. Just one year ago, who would have thought that the Wall Street Journal would run a story – a highly positive story – on the anti-consumerist thoughts of magnificent activist Reverend Billy and The Church of Life After Shopping?
Read the article – with quotes such as: “It’s hard to imagine Timothy Geithner (former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now the United States Secretary of the Treasury, ed.) taking advice from an iconoclast dressed in a white suit, clerical collar and Elvis-inspired hair, but the Reverend Billy may be on to something.

In place of a system where big banks and corporations enter neighborhoods only to profit from them, Reverend Billy wants to empower small banks and credit unions that hold a stake in the communities they serve by offering incentives and making it harder for big finance to undercut local business.

It’s hard to argue against the system he envisions.”

Watch the Wall Street Journal video below:

Internet being bombed back to the stone age tomorrow?

Posted on | April 16, 2009 | No Comments

Tomorrow will be a big milestone in Internet-, technology-, copyright-, music-, movie- and civil right history: The Swedish court will announce their verdict in the so-called ‘spectrial‘, where the people behind The Pirate Bay (TBP) have been accused ao. of assisting copyright infringement. Although both parties will appeal the sentence if being ruled against, it will still indicate the Swedish courts’ overall view on the matter.

Ultimately, if TBP is sentenced, it will create precedence for copyright vs. technology cases across the globe for many years to come and give the established music- and moviebusiness (IFPI, RIAA and MPAA) a whole new legal range of tools to fasten their grip on artistic material – while bombing new network- and distribution technologies and mindsets back to the stone age.

We should all be holding our breath.

By the way, check out this support party in Pushkin Square in Moscow happening today.

High expectations

Posted on | April 15, 2009 | No Comments

Am I the only one who is enormously curious to find out what Flattr is?

I did not know about the thing before it was mentioned in a tweet from Peter Sunde, one of people behind the The Pirate Bay, a couple of days ago.

Waiting impatiently.

Statebook: because knowledge is power

Posted on | April 11, 2009 | No Comments

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has launched ‘Statebook’, a website that lists all the information the British authorities hold on each individual citizen in the United Kingdom. It’s really, really scary to see how much and how detailed information is being collected.

ORG writes in their blog: “Today we launched a campaign site, portraying the seemingly unregulated amassing of personal data by the state.

Called Statebook, it is a spoof government site, listing all the information government holds an an individual citizen, based on FIPR and the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust’s Database State report.

The site also shows what what new information the Government want to collect, through new schemes, like the “Intercept Modernisation Programme” which could even include amassing all of our Internet traffic data in a single government database.”

Check out the site here.