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Sweden to Give Courts New Power to Hunt IP Infringers
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Swedish Culture & Justice ministers are preparing to give new power to Swedish courts to let them force ISPs to give up subscriber IPs. The end goal is trying subscribers in court for copyright infringement. As the one-time home of the Pirate Bay, which is now internationally distributed, they face both US pressure and push-back at home. The Swedish arm of the Pirate Party is calling this move a 'sanctioned blackmailing operation', but hopefully the Swedish courts won't allow the IFPI to use as many tricks as the RIAA has in US courts."
The best solution to the problem of increasing and unbalanced government and law enforcement power over the lives of everyday citizens is to educate the public as much as possible about the problem. Although the perpetually increasing powers of governments over our lives are being perpetrated in the name of protecting intellectual property today, they have nothing to do with the intellect or with anyone's property. Rather this is a ploy to gain control. Today it's IP. Yesterday it was the idea that everybody should be equal (Communism), tomorrow it'll be some other lame excuse.
If the media companies really wanted to put an end to piracy, they'd lower the prices of music recordings, movies, and other media, so that people would purchase legitimate originals, since they're superior to pirated materials and since the cost is reasonable anyway.
The only reason, and I do mean the ONLY reason, that people waste their time to pirate this crap, is because they perceive its value to be much less than its cost. Take a newspaper dispenser for example. You can put in your 25 cents or whatever a newspaper costs nowadays, open the door, and jack all the papers inside the machine. How many times in the history of the world has this happened? NONE! You know why? Because the cost of a newspaper is sufficiently low (i.e., reasonable) that nobody would bother. I believe that the added sales of music and movies due to lower prices would more than compensate for the lower per-unit revenue, not because piracy would end, but because people would simply buy more music and movies given that they're much more affordable.
What you are talking about, redistribution of content, is completely absurd! If you DO have authorization to, say download and use a file, and your are getting said file from a computer network that you are not directly an IP address of - then more than likely chances are said file will be cached at a lot of places before it gets to you. These caches are NOT AUTHORISED to redistribute content to you!! In other words walk down to a "real" shop, who have gained AUTHORIZATION at every step in the distribution chain and then wait for it there... In the world of 1's and 0's your argument is entirely one sided and erroneous. Let these "copyright holders" pay for the distribution through the web of their content (ISPs, TELCOs, exchanges, taxes, etc, etc) then what you say may, just may, be valid. Until then why should they be able to illegaly distribute content and not me!