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…

For the first time in my life I’ve been following the Confederations Cup. The only reason I knew of it was thanks to the game Football/Championship Manager. The championship as far as it’s gone now is so entertaining that it will share the priority that the World Cup and European Cup have in my football calendar. For those of you who have no clue what it is, it’s essentially the champions from each continent (North+Central American, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia) playing in a pre-world cup championship. Of course, the current World Cup champions (Italy) and the host nation (South Africa) are also included in the line-up.

The result is a good mix of different styles of football, and varying levels of skill and finesse. At the one extreme, we have Spain, current European Champions, and the best team in the Cup in my opinion. On the other, we have New Zealand, who are so embarrassingly terrible that I wonder whether Australasia will continue to have a guaranteed spot in the Confederations Cup… The small number of participating teams makes for a quick tournament, with only two groups. This year it seems they groups have been divided in a shockingly lopsided fashion. One group contains Spain, Iraq, South Africa and New Zealand. All but Spain are out of their depth in international football, and the battle lies between South Africa and Iraq to see which is the less bad team, so to speak. The other group consists of Brazil, Italy, USA and Egypt. I expected the outcome here to be a forgone conclusion, but have been delightfully surprised by the performance of Egypt (current African Champions), after a close 3-4 loss against Brazil, and what looks like a 1-0 win over Italy. If South Africa don’t make it to the semi’s, which seems rather decided, Egypt will be my team of favour, without a doubt!

Watching the coverage on Swedish TV, the discussion has become rather focused on the horns used by the audience to make a heck of a noise. I believe they call the horn a “vuvuzela”. It seems this is considered disturbing by a large portion of the audience. Swedish TV did a poll, and close to 75% of those who answered felt the vuvuzela should be banned from the stadium. Even Sepp Blatter (FIFA President) tackled questions on the vuvuzela at a press conference. Sepp Blatter said that in coming to Africa, one must accept the difference in culture; that Africa is about noise, chaos, rhythm, dancing and feeling, or something along those lines. I couldn’t agree more. Seriously, if you want quiet games so you can hear the commentators (who are incredibly annoying, but that’s for another post) then you seem to lack the passion for football and lively stadiums which I consider an integral part of the sport. Does it frustrate you when supporters sing songs in Europe, bang drums and blow whistles in South America, etc?? This is part of the football culture in South Africa, and this is what lifts the roof and spirits of the players. As the commentators are full of sh*t anyway, you can just mute your TV rather than demand that an entire nation, if not continent, adhere to your sensitive ideas of what is right and wrong. Or you can just turn off your TV and SHUT UP!