Sweden Sees Boom In Legal Downloading

Quantos writes with word that in Sweden, in addition to a drop in traffic following the introduction of the IPRED anti-file sharing law, the country also saw a doubling of legal downloads. "The sale of music via the Internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. '...I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,' said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services." Meanwhile The Pirate Bay's anticipated VPN service has seen over 113,000 requests for beta invitations since late last month; 80% are from Sweden. Traffic numbers may begin to rise again once the service goes live.

Comments

Doubling... I guess

[retech]

While going from 18 to 36 legal sales is technically a doubling... I'm not sure I'd call it a boon.

I'm crushed

[NotQuiteReal]

Here, we are led to believe that Swedes are naturally a bunch of thieving leeches, only cowed by John Law.

I always thought they were all giant blond buxom women who gave excellent massages.

I am so disappointed.

Re:I'm crushed

[supernova_hq]

Depends if you're face up or face down.

Troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because there are more people in Los Angeles county than the entire country of Sweden, don't think you'll get away with this blatant troll.

Wait a minute... aren't Trolls from Sweden? D'oh!

Swedes are allowing terrorism to work...

[gnesterenko]

I know, its harsh and maybe too soon, but essentially that is what is going on here. Finally, a real credible threat of prosecution due to file sharing, and so SOME started buying legally. Sales go up and now this is going to be used by corps as evidence that we need stricter online laws etc etc, file sharing dies, corps rake in more dough for subpar products. Nothing good will come of this... that is of course until smart, talented coders come up with even a more anonymous way of sharing that keeps everyone's nose out of our business. Pirate Bay is trying something in this respect, but not quite there, still just disguising you using the old method. New guys will code around this by summer and things will go back to normal - I will hope.

Re:Swedes are allowing terrorism to work...

[bit01]

and so SOME started buying legally

SOME is the operative word.

Since they didn't give numbers, they didn't compare in any way to the change in illegal downloads and it's a highly biased source I have to assume the number of legal downloaders has gone up from some small number to two times some small number. Probably only a fraction of the illegal downloads.

They're trying to create the standard "everybody's doing it and you should too" dishonest marketing BS. Similar to the recent windows netbook "stories".

---

The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".

+1, Troll

[SEWilco]

Parent should be modded +1, Troll, but there seems to be some difficulty with that.

In other news...

[pcolaman]

After sweeping porn and prostitution tax collection laws were passed, the legal purchase of properly documented strippers and prostitutes in Sweden increases by 75%. Officials have begun talks into other laws that can be passed to decrease syphilis, the plague, torn euros, smudged photos, and world hunger.

What's the lesson here?

[chub_mackerel]

So what does this demonstrate other than that strong legal prohibitions and penalties can affect how people behave?

An extreme example: if a country passed a law making it a capital crime to buy cheese from anyone other than the King's brother, I imagine that 1) the level of activity in the open cheese markets would go down markedly the day after the law was passed; and 2) Regis Frater CheeseCo would be booming.

So again, how is this result surprising and/or newsworthy? Isn't this exactly what you'd expect unless Swedes are totally disrespectful of their country's legal system already? (Give 'em a few more laws like this and they might get there!)

Re:What's the lesson here?

[ljw1004]

I think the lesson is that if you're a media business who wants to double your revenue, then doing it through lobbying is a cheaper and easier way than doing it through innovating new technologies or products, or through satisfying your customers better.

The VpN

[goombah99]

The VPN mentioned is kinda bizarre if you think about it.

First, the whole strength of bit-torrent is scalability through it's use of edge connections avoiding a central hub.

VPN would necessarily be through a central hub and thus not direct peer to peer.

I suppose perhaps they are thinking that the p2p would continue outside the VPN but the low bandwidth tracker and maybe some of he handshaking would be contacted via VPN?

It's not dead obvious what is meant since it is often the case that when a user invokes a VPN, the the OS's entire network adapter switches over to the Vitrual one and the physical one is not used except to transact the VPN connection. (hence making the VPN transparent to the client browsers and such)

On the flip side, this would be a very special VPN nexus not just a general purpose one: namely if you ran all the p2p traffic through it then nearly all the requests would be for packets that had already passed through the nexus earlier. So hanging a cache off the nexus would make things simpler. It would no longer be p2p at all but rather a clearing house for packets of common interest.

Re:The VpN

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, from watching the projects of TPB, and trying to use the PRQ services, they are pretty stupid. They lucked out with their main project becoming popular and giving them name recognition, then they boosted that with how they condescendingly treat lawyers.

But from a hardcore geek level, they don't seem to know what they're doing. They're like those anarchist warez kids everyone knows, who know enough to land jobs in datacenters or big companies, but still seem to have some stunted development keeping them at a teenaged level.

I'd never trust their "anonymous" services. They've made obvious security mistakes that I had no trouble finding, making me doubt everything they do. If you're finding faults in their VPN idea, you probably have the skill to find them everywhere else if you took a look at how they do other things.

Stick with people who know what they're doing, like Tor developers. Help find better ways, because it's unlikely the TPB will ever offer anything truly worthwhile.

Re:The VpN

[slash.duncan]

Being a consistent USENET user since I discovered it, I find your idea fascinating. To this day I don't get what the big deal is with bittorrent as opposed to USENET, especially with yEnc on binaries so the encoding overhead is relatively low.

As for the message-id/nntp issues, that's reasonably easily solved. One could hash the torrent title (or tracker URL) into the subject header, with a block sequence number replacing the M/N series number. That would put the relevant data all in the overview so a client wouldn't have to pull more than that to see what was available. (Users could still track poster reputation that way. An alternative would replace a portion of the author header as well, but that would make it harder to track poster reputation.)

The biggest problems I see would be two, USENET is obscure enough it might be a hard feature to explain and to explain how to configure for one's USENET provider, and depending on how it was introduced and what sort of standard was agreed (or not), there could be conflicting implementations.

Also, given the amount of data involved, there'd certainly need to be a whole hierarchy, alt.binaries.torrent-parts.*, perhaps organized by tracker host, with a misc-tracker hierarchy for the little ones, then by genre, or maybe more generically by first letter or two of the torrent title (with or without tracker host).

But OTOH, part of the appeal of USENET is its relative obscurity, in part due to the relative technical literacy one must have to make it work at any decent level of efficiency. Think the general idea of Eternal September and etc tho if someone's open enough to learning netiquette and can RTFM and FAQ if pointed at them, glad to have 'em. Making USENET an extension of a very popular P2P protocol would NOT do anything to keep it that way.

Re:WIll it last?

[Joce640k]

It's still in the process of appearing, but yes. That one or something similar.

In a technology war, the P2P users will always win. The only way to stop it is a law so draconian in scope that the whole Internet would collapse from fear of connecting to it.

Doesn't matter

[symbolset]

They just gave the ??AA a budget for their lobbyists of "more is better". They've killed the Internet.

There's no way that group wouldn't neuter the Bill of Rights for that kind of money, and there's no way our elected representatives won't sell out. It's over. It's been nice knowing y'all.

In five years let's get together on I2:The guerrilla mesh WWAN.

according to digital content provider InProdicon

[siddesu]

DNRTFA, but given the source I'd hold my horses until someone with a less obvious bias comments on the effects of the law.

I read...

[Quantos]

I read the article and his blog and came to the conclusion that somewhere some medical professionals are looking for him.
I don't see anything on his site that has any verifiable information on it. He's put a lot of work into trying to connect the dots, but to me it just sounds like a conspiracy theory nut.

Re:So its back to the cd days

[theheadlessrabbit]

So its back to the CD days. You couldn't really listen to the music and were forced to buy the cd so now instead of being able to download, listen and then reject all the crap people are now forced to download/buy crap.

It's not my intention to troll, but this is a little sensationalist.
Many bands will allow you to listen to their entire album before purchase via free streaming.
It's inconvenient, the quality ranges from poor to mediocre, but it does address the 'try before you buy' concern. Saying that we are now forced to buy our music before listening to it is false.

Consider the source.

[Dutchmaan]

The sale of music via the internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the

Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon.

I'm sorry, but I'd use any numbers provided by content providers with a grain, or a block, of salt. It would not surprise me in the least if numbers weren't fluffed a little or a lot to provide further leverage for future legislation.

Waiting for verdicts

[Andtalath]

Many swedes are quite cautious by nature, this dip is no bigger than the dip in chips and other products which produced large doses of acryl-amid which was a scary report a few years back.
People are waiting for other people to tell them that it's actually quite all right to download, that the risks aren't all that high until they start downloading again.

The more conscious level of people are just waiting for a legal precedent, since the fact is that no-one currently knows exactly how easy it is to be caught using today's measures.

The thing is, there's the requirement of strong evidence and a proportionally big damage has to done.
No-one knows what this means yet, uploading is being referenced as one of those things, massive scale is another.
So, it might very well turn out that only original seeders are truly affected by this law.

Personally, I'm keeping my traffic down by not downloading in HD and only using private trackers.
Also, I checked the private alternatives, and they all suck, seriously.

Re:Waiting for verdicts

[genmax]

I don't think that's a valid counter argument to what the article is claiming. You're saying that the dip in sales corresponds to people being cautious in the wake of the new laws, and buying music instead of 'stealing'. But that still corroborates the *AA companies' claim that if there were no piracy, they would be making a lot more money -- and hence p2p file sharing is depriving them of income. I would really challenge the doubling claims which, as other poster have pointed out, is coming from an obviously biased source. I'm not sure why InProdicon is unwilling to give out actual numbers, and I think they need to do a lot more work before credibly claiming that any increases are because of the IPRED law.

How to Lie with Statistics

[Gutboy]

Given that they don't want to give actual numbers, for all we know sales went from 1 to 2 (100% increase). This whole article is a propaganda piece.

UMMM!

[Anonymous Coward]

it may not be ralted to Ipred laws at all, maybe they just ran a huge advertising campaign, or maybe there could be other causes, does anyone know how much online music sales have fluctuated globaly in that time period?, it wouldn`t surprise me if more people where buying music track by track online rather than by CD in the shops with the global economy in the state its in.

No surprise

[BetterThanCaesar]

Indeed. The record industry sanctioned alternatives, including services like Spotify, have been growing in popularity since long before the IPRED law. They continue to grow at roughly the same rate. Only relative to the non-sanctioned downloads have they grown significantly, and seriously, this is probably just a bump in the graph. This is not sensational news.