Slashdot Mirror
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.
While going from 18 to 36 legal sales is technically a doubling... I'm not sure I'd call it a boon.
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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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!
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.
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.
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!)
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
No sig today...
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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 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.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert