Slashdot Mirror
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."
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).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"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.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.