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...

[T Murphy]

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

Except Britain, of course.

I was under the impression the British government took privacy very - almost too - seriously. They even have those cameras set up to monitor private lives - ensuring no one's right to privacy goes overlooked or unwatched. How can the government know their citizens have privacy if the government can't watch?

This is not over yet...

[Sholmas]

The Minister of Culture has said he supports the outing of "pirates", and will support the so-called "pirate-hunters" in their application for a new lisence. Google Translate link: http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dagbladet.no%2F2009%2F06%2F23%2Fkultur%2Ffildeling%2Fteknio%2Ftrond_giske%2F6860130%2F&sl=no&tl=en&history_state0=

Re:This is not over yet...

[verbalcontract]

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

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.

Re:This is not over yet...

[hyfe]

Yes, but in the same article Ove Skåra from Datatilsynet (computer-watch.. government institution set up to help protect our privacy. They give out permits for surveillance cameraes and can give out legally binding rulings to companies who are in breach of privacy-laws) is quoted with saying:

"- Da er et brev med en anbefaling på ingen måte nok. Hvis ikke det kommer noen nye opplysninger, vil jeg ikke tro at brevet gjør noen særlig forskjell, sier han. "

(..since we recently had a meeting with the department concerning this..)
"- A letter with a recommondation is by no means enough. Unless there is new information relevant to the case, I do not believe the letter will make any difference".

Re:This is not over yet...

[omglolbah]

Actually, the issue here isnt the logging in itself.

It is that what is police business is now pretty much outsourced to a private entity. An entity with a very strong economic stake in said business.

The ip addresses this firm has collected has for instance been used to demand personal information on users from ISPs. They want to have the right to acquire that sort of information -without- involving the courts. That is completely unacceptable. What makes this even worse is that what is currently happening and could become legal precedence in Norway is the practice of one private entity demanding information on the customer of another private entity against this private entity's will.

The courts are the -only- entity that should be allowed to extract this sort of information. A private entity should not be given the rights of a court of law.

I'd love to be more clear and eloquent in my writing but I've spent 12 hours in a hot metal box testing hardware :-p

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.

Election year

[Ost99]

Don't expect this to be the last word on the matter, the politicians just don't want to rock the boat right now.

The Minister of culture has openly supported the vigilante tactics of the "pirate-hunters", but this is probably not the right time of the 4-year election cycle to do anything drastic.
During the last election the same man promised to re-legalese file sharing. The statement was retracted only days after a surprising high turnout of young voters won him and his party the election...

Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters:

[Dionysus]

1. What's the tech economy like over there?
2. How long does it take to learn your language OR how English friendly is it?
3. What's the average cost of living in your cities?

1. It's OK. Mostly in finance and oil industry. Java (SOA) is heavily used.
2. Business is basically English (even for Norwegian companies). My company has Swedes (lots), Sri Lankan, Englishmen, couple of Indians/Pakistani, French. Coding/documentation is in English.
3. About like Bay Area.

All that, and we get standard 5 weeks of paid vacation, paternity/maternity leave (husband/wife get to share how much they spend at home the first year), strong currency (relatively cheap to buy stuff when you travel), beautiful Swedish women.
Minuses: a socialist government and Jante Law ingrained in the Norwegian psyche.

Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters:

[TheMaister]

1. Soso. Opera's doing very nicely these days at least. :p Also, I think we're a leading force in micro/nano technology.

2. Norwegian is kinda hard to learn as you can't learn it well by studying alone. It has so many ways of expressing yourself that wouldn't make any sense in eg. English. I guess it's the same for most languages, but Norwegian is considered a hard language to learn because of all the irregularites. Something we learn in school is "EVERY rule has an (many) exceptions." :p English and Norwegian is in the same language familiy though (Germanic). But hey, what do I know about learning Norwegian from scratch, as I'm a native speaker :p

3. Expensive, in fact, VERY expensive, but the wages are pretty good (even if you don't have a high class job, you can still earn a lot), so I guess it evens out. Just avoid Oslo, as it's the #2 (or #1?) most expensive city in the world.

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:How do I Immigrate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instructions

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:How do I Immigrate?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Critical oil industry application skills would be a help. Or saturation diving experience.

. . . and if your idea of Christmas Dinner is a blow-torched sheep's head, you're in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalahove

"I got dibs on the tongue!"

Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters:

[The Wannabe King]

That depends on how you calculate it. The income tax is usually about 30 % - 35 % for an ordinary income ($60k). The marginal tax rate is 47.8 % for income over $110k. In addition the employer has to pay a tax of 14.1 % of the employee's income that the employee never sees. It should probably be included. The VAT is a whopping 25 % (14 % on food).

If you make a lot of money, and spend most of it on non-food, it is probably possible to pass 60 %, but that is rare.

I would also say the numbers are misleading without some information on what you get. Norway, like the rest of Europe, has universal heath care so there is no health insurance to pay, no matter what preconditions you may have. The taxes also include unemployment benefits, a pension plan and 100 % pay for a year if you can't work due to illness. Comparing tax rates without accounting for insurances you absolutely need to have is not fair.

The summary is wrong.

[IrquiM]

The "pirate chasing"-lawyers got a temporary license in 2006 for doing exactly that while we were waiting for new laws.

That license is now expiring (This autumn) and they're not getting a new one. Not because they want to protect the privacy of Norwegian citizens, but because temporary is temporary.

Now, read my last sentence again please.

(Still though, Norway's a good place to live - can recommend it to everyone!)

Re:How do I Immigrate?

[Kjella]

Before we scare away all the nice people, it's a traditional christmas dinner but not the most typical. Top three are pork ribs, Pinnekjøtt and Lutefisk. A minority has also adopted the english christmas turkey, smalahove is probably around 5th place. P.S. If you read anywhere that Pizza Grandiosa is popular for christmas, it's for the kids that don't want the wierd stuff :D

Re:How do I Immigrate?

[AliasMarlowe]

Top three are pork ribs, Pinnekjøtt and Lutefisk.

Advice: avoid lutefisk. It's nasty, very nasty.
In fact, in the nastiest dish in the world competition, Norway powered into second place with lutefisk. It was judged more repulsive than Scotland's haggis, but less disgusting than the Swedish entry, surströmming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstrmming, even the Swedes have to drink a bottle of vodka before eating it).
Boiled sheep's eyes or raw sea-slugs taste a lot nicer than lutefisk or surströmming. I speak from actual experience.