rockless.org

There has long been a discussion in Sweden about file sharing and copyright. The Pirate Bay and IPRED are heavily discussed in the media. With the emerging of the Pirate Party it is obvious that the current legislation concerning copyright is not the right direction. We need more discussion about it.

That’s why it is so sick that the RIAA carry out blackmail against file sharers, the latest being a woman fined 1,9 million dollars for downloading 24 songs. The numbers are just absurd. 80 000 dollars per song. I guess the music industry is trying to scare people from downloading with these absurd numbers, but it’s not the way go. What we need is dialogue. Internet is a new media and we have entered a new period where information exchange is a people’s right, choking this freedom does not help. Governments can come up with laws to prevent illegal file sharing but there will always be ways to go around the laws and if the governments just go further and further in implementing new laws on top of the old ones we will soon be living in a totalitarian society.

We need dialogue between the file sharers and the industry to come up with new ways of distribute the media and make it legal. Hunting down music and movie lovers like they are heavy criminals is just wrong. I don’t see anything wrong with people sharing, illegal or not, movies, music and other media. It’s part of the wonder of internet: unlimited information exchange.

You can’t illegalize file sharing without coming up with more options on how to access media legally on the internet. The idea Radiohead had to let the fans decide the price of the album was brilliant. It can also be that the media industries would profit more from this strategy in that the bigger fans would pay much more for the music than what the market price for an album is right now. I don’t mind paying for downloading, but the price has to be reasonable. I don’t see this happening though, the film and music industry seem so incredibly greedy and are only focused in making profit that they are not concered to the advantages internet has to the society as a whole.

I do hope that governments stop seeing information exchange as a bad thing and let the internet be a free forum that promotes freedom of speech.