Sweden doesn’t understand the internet
Posted by Charles | Filed under Politiks
By Sweden I mean the powers that be. Politicians and courts. The latest case to be prosecuted is so ridiculous it would be laughable, if it wasn’t so frightening. A lot has been said about it already in various Swedish blogs and newspapers, so I thought I would spread the word to others not fluent in Swedish. After all, in this globalised world of the internet, links (which lie at the heart of the issue) are global by nature. Several links in this text lead to Swedish resources, as I have been unable to find English language resources covering this scandal (except for The Local).
The case is as follows: Canal+, one of Sweden’s largest rights holders to premium sports events, streams sports on their website. If you know the URL, it seems the stream is publicly accessible. An individual posted links to two ice hockey games on his website, and is now being prosecuted for linking to these games. The argument is that the links themselves made the streams accessible to the public. Anyone with a basic level of understanding of the internet and the technology involved realises the hollow nature of this claim. Most suppliers of premium streaming content have systems ensuring that only subscribers can access the streams. The whole case seems so preposterous that I’m in doubt as to whether media has correctly understood and reported the details of the claim. However, I’m simply relaying the information Swedish media is publishing.
Several parallels have been drawn to the Pirate Bay case, where The Pirate Bay was essentially prosecuted for linking. They were not hosting files, nor were they supplying the bandwidth over which the file sharing was being conducted. They were a search engine, granted specialised in torrent search (torrents being one of the preferred technologies for file sharing, both illegal and legal).
The latest case has been compared to what’s happening in Iran, in principle. The censorship of communication and restriction of the flow of information. The “crime” has been translated to its analogue equivalent: putting up a sign saying “Watch the game at XYZ tonight”. These comparisons are fair enough in my opinion. What is surprising is that the middle aged lobbyists and prosecutors are blind to this simple truth. To prosecute someone for a specific link is essentially a matter of prosecuting the use of the internet.
I hope for the sake of Sweden’s reputation as an progressive internet-savvy country that this lawsuit and others like it are thrown out of court so fast it makes the prosecutors head spin. In fact, the prosecutors head should already be spinning. After all, this is a specially appointed prosecutor, Henrik Rasmusson, specialist in copyright and intellectual rights issues. As a “specialist”, one might expect him to possess a somewhat deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play, and the shaky ground upon which this case is built.
It is with great anticipation and trepidation I await the outcome of this farce…
One Response to “Sweden doesn’t understand the internet”
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Wednesday, June 24th 2009 Says:
June 24th, 2009 at 18:40[...] at Canal+ and Swedish special attorney Henrik Rasmusson. Canal + for suing and Henrik Rasmusson for prosecuting a poor guy who linke to a live stream from Canal +. It sucks. They don’t understand the web, they have nothing to do with our Internet and should [...]
