Savage Popcorn

Last week several Swedish MPs – from the Moderate Party – have called for (via) the decriminalisation of online file sharing. The article is worth reading but the crux of their argument is this:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

I’m not about to start condoning media piracy and I do think that artists should be compensated for their work. But it also strikes me that the media industry – the distributors, the promoters and the rest – are less concerned with protecting artist revenues and more interested in shielding themselves from the changing realities of their chosen market.

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