Norwegian Lawyers Must Stop Chasing File Sharers

Skapare sends word from TorrentFreak that Norway's Simonsen law firm has lost their license to pursue file sharers. "Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed." Skapare adds, "Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA. More info on the Norwegian perspective in this Google translation from Dagbladet.no."

Comments

Half-right...

[Chabo]

Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA.

A bigger part of it is just that European governments take the privacy of their citizens very seriously.

Except Britain, of course.

Re:Half-right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Britain, of course.

And lets not forget France. And occasionally Germany, and at some point or another pretty much every "western" country.

Or maybe they don't care...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.

The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.

Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.

So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).

Re:Or maybe they don't care...

[causality]

Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.

The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.

Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.

So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).

I've always felt that when govenrments worry about things like piracy and drug usage, what they're really doing is sending the message "we have an overabundance of resources and personnel which is why we can afford to worry about these things -- please reduce our size and power immediately." The message is quite clear but there are a lot of people who have difficulty interpreting it.

Re:This is not over yet...

[TheRealMindChild]

Which I don't really think is a bad thing in and of itself. If you can prove reasonably that someone downloaded MovieX, by all means, fine them 10x the going retail price. The trick is to go after people you KNOW committed copyright infringement. Not the maybe's. Not the torrent sites/Napster-like software producers.

Re:This is not over yet...

[bertoelcon]

"Pirate-hunters" -- you are speaking of course about their age-old enemies, the ninjas?

Is this why we never hear of piracy reports from Japan. I just put two and two together and it now makes perfect sense.

It's not fair!

[Locke2005]

The most beautiful women in the world, AND they protect pirates!?! Damn, I wish I were Norwegian!

Well..

[hyfe]

Full disclosure: I'm Norwegian! As somebody who has spent a fair time abroad, I'm growing to like Norway more and more. We're just, well, sensible. The ISP's don't censor, don't log and don't do crappy shit. They all do subscribe to a voluntary kidporn DNS-filter though. I actually downloaded the list of wikileaks once, switched to opendns (whom we all should avoid) and checked it out. I really, really regretted it. There really was childporn there. Anybody getting of on that shit needs to have their dick cut off. Either way, the ISP's are upfront if they're selling internet with usage limits (mainly due to strong Norwegian customer protection, companies aren't allowed to fuck you over), and everything just generally works. Not that that stops most norwegian from bitching about everything though. Bitching is kinda the national past-time. Seriously, I'm a big believer in the "freedom to not be fucked over". I definitivly enjoy not being screwed over, and I really do think more people should subscribe to it :)

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISP's don't censor ... They all do subscribe to a voluntary kidporn DNS-filter though.

Censoring kidporn is censorship! I'm sure kiddy-porn fans would consider Norway "sensible" if they didn't do this. Just goes to show: people like when their government does what they want - regardless of the consequences for everyone else, and I'm talking about both piracy and kiddy porn with that statement.

Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters:

[orzetto]

Not Norwegian myself, though lived there 7 years. Possibly moving back in the near future.

1. 1. Pretty good I would say. The country has had budget surplus for years and is not feeling the effects of the crisis as bad as e.g. Iceland. Estate prices actually went up 4% first quarter (most Norwegians do own their home, so it's a good indicator).
2. 2. Norwegian is not as difficult as German but not as easy as French, many words are not guessable. Main difficulty is that everybody speaks very good English and practising Norwegian is quite difficult if you are not strong-willed. Also, most imported TV shows and movies are in original language (i.e. 90% English). Learning Norwegian also means you can read Danish and read/understand Swedish.
3. 3. Insane, but you pay what you get for. Alcoholic beverages quite expensive because of local edition of prohibition never really being abolished. Foodstuffs are expensive because of protectionism, and quality is lacking (keep in mind I come from a country with high food standard, so I am picky; from the US it's probably still an improvement). Other wares (computer parts, internet connections, whatever could interest a slashdotter) are in line with most of Europe. However, salaries are pretty high for most standards. Note that the Gini index is quite low, i.e. as a sysadmin you will make more than in the US, but not as a CEO.

You forgot to ask for:

• Taxes; it's 25% VAT IIRC, plus about 25-30% on your income (that's for a typical engineering job, after all detractions are taken care of). In 2007 I made 458 kNOK (about $100k) gross as a C++ programmer and paid 29.5% in direct taxes.
• Healthcare: Grand Old Socialist system. You pay 7.8% of gross income (that's already included in the figure at the previous point), when you go to the hospital you could have to pay a fee; anything beyond a certain amount (it used to be 1600 NOK / $250) is shouldered by the state, though. Dentists are for reasons unknown to me only private (and guess what, that's the part of the Norwegian health care that it expensive and broken).
• Bureaucracy: pretty efficient. I live in Germany now and I think the Norwegians did a better job. Not boneheaded at following rules, result-oriented but not scruffy.

So yes, it's a pretty nice place to be, unless you can't stand snow, rain, and socialists in power.

Yarrrrr...

[petrus4]

I'm currently sitting here listening to an mp3 of the Symphony of the Seas, from the old album Hooked on Classics, along with mental flashbacks of the scene where the Jolly Roger was raised during Pirates of the Carribean.

As this article refers to a victory for piracy, it is a good opportunity to issue a collective, impassioned scream of defiance against the very concept of intellectual property; to remind ourselves of who the enemy is, and why they must, and eventually will, be entirely and unrelentingly destroyed.

WIPO, RIAA, MPAA, and other related organisations, you are recognised as institutions which perpetuate the toxic mentality that making money is, in itself, more important than being alive to spend it. In our ongoing war with you, it is we, the greater public of this planet, who have the will of God on our side. We will have justice. We will have vengeance.

You are going to be removed from human memory.

Re:Yarrrrr...

[Anonymous Coward]

entitled to a small amount of protection

"Small"? Really?

And you should always offset your mentality by the fact that you didn't create anything in a vacuum. The creation might have been written down by you, but it was created by all of society, in an abstract sense.

Re:Yarrrrr...

[Anonymous Coward]

You will get paid. WHAT THE PRODUCT IS WORTH! ONCE!

You will no longer have a lifetime plus monopoly on making money with that product tho.

The same system the rest of the world has been using for goods and services for a very long time.

We gave you copyrights. A LIMITED monopoly on the sales of your creative works. And you fucked us over. You ruined it. good fucking job. you got all fucking greedy and expect to be paid FOREVER for creating something once.

Well you better fucking give that idea up. We're not going to put up with it anymore.

Either that or you'll 'win'. And i expect to be paid residual income from all the houses i've built in the last 20 years. And everyone else will step up to collect perpetual fees for the products they created.

Really now. Which system do you want? Can't have both. Either we all deserve to be paid forever for creating something once. Or we get paid once for creating something.

Re:Yarrrrr...

[Mr2001]

Once you bring in "value added", suddenly cars and crops become legitimate property. The same goes for the digital world.

Not quite.

A car is legitimate property because it can only be in one place at a time. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore. As the owner of a car, you have the right to hang onto that car until you voluntarily give it up, so if I want it, I'll have to pay you (or convince you some other way).

Information doesn't work that way. You can keep your copy of a song, program, etc. and use it however you like even while someone else is distributing copies: their use can't possibly conflict with your use. It makes no sense to apply the concept of ownership to something like that; it's unnecessary at best, and dangerous at worst.

You're right about creating things in a vacuum, though. A farmer owns his crops not because he designed them from scratch at the molecular level -- he didn't -- but because they grew out of seeds, soil, fertilizer, and water that all belonged to him already. Likewise, a car company owns the cars they make because those cars were made from steel and other materials the company already owned, and a car buyer owns his car because he got it in a voluntary exchange: the money he paid for the car was compensation for the car maker's loss of that car.

Along the same lines, if I learn some information (say, someone sends it to me over the internet) and use it to rearrange bits on my hard drive, the hard drive still belongs to me. If I then want to describe that pattern of bits to someone else (say, send it to them over the internet), I believe I'm entitled to do so: surely I have the right to share facts about a chunk of metal I own, right?

Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, your employer pays fully for health, retirement and unemployment insurance for the rest of your life? Even if you are fired over some petty politics, get physically sick, get mentally ill, are downsized, the organization goes bankrupt, or the pension/insurance scheme collapses?

I've worked in America. The winners brag about how great the system is; the losers were once as arrogant as you but have no means to express their regret. People like you are the Believers who pray each time the storm rampages through their city; each time you thank Providence for your survival and cite the paucity of Faithful counterexamples.