There Is Something Rotten in the State of Sweden

Joakim Kämpe
Jun. 04, 2006

"In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to the [ISP Rix|Port80's] personnel. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at the [BitTorrent - tracker] The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copyright law, alternatively assisting breach of copyright law.

The police officers were allowed access to the racks where the [The Pirate Bay] servers and other servers are hosted. All servers in the racks were clearly marked as to which sites run on each. The police took down all servers in the racks, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån, the mission of which is to defend the rights of [The Pirate Bay] via public debate.

According to police officers simultaneously questioning the president of Rix|Port80, the purpose of the search warrant is to take down [The Pirate Bay] in order to secure evidence of the allegations mentioned above.

The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existence of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained. Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing whether it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal."

A quick background for those of you that are not familiar with BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay site lets people search for and download a small text file (a torrent file). A torrent file can roughly be described as containing information as to where, for instance, a certain musical file can be found. With the help of a web browser, the users navigate to the The Pirate Bay site that lists the torrents available. Via the web browser the user downloads a torrent file and opens it using a BitTorrent client. After opening the torrent, the client connects to the The Pirate Bay - tracker, which provides it with a list of other clients currently downloading the file or files. These BitTorrent clients have nothing to do with The Pirate Bay. So, the The Pirate Bay - tracker can best be described as a server that facilitates the traffic between downloader and file sharer. In this sense it does not differ from a regular ISP, since they also facilitate traffic between two or more peers. No copyrighted material actually exists on the The Pirate Bay servers.

However, this seems to be of no worry to the legal expert Henrik Pontén of the Swedish anti piracy agency Antipiratbyrån. According to him, activities that indirectly manage copyrighted material can still be considered criminal. That is why the allegations made are for assisting breach of or participating to breach copyright law. This, however, would also mean that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Altavista must be shut down because it is possible, and quite easy, to find illegal material through them.

It is also of interest to note that Antipiratbyrån, through this police raid, managed to get their political adversary, the public debate forum Piratbyrån which is related to, but not the same as, The Pirate Bay, offline. Especially in the past year, since the downloading of copyrighted material was made illegal in Sweden, Piratbyrån has worked as the political nemesis of Antipiratbyrån. They have several times questioned the sanity of making millions of people in Sweden criminals overnight, and have repeatedly questioned the current copyright laws. The legality of shutting down a web site that does nothing but maintain a public debate on copyright issues can be severely questioned. It hardly makes it look better that an anti-piracy agency is behind it. To make matters even worse, Antipiratbyrån virtually acts as an extension of the Swedish state, and have almost been given the status of a government organisation. Also, as reported by the Swedish state television SVT (video file, Swedish only) and the internet magazine IDG (Swedish only), it was American interest groups that pressured Swedish politicians, who in turn pressured the Swedish police, to perform this raid. Since when did Swedish politicians start running errands for American lobbyists?

Now, I am not making any statements regarding whether sharing or downloading files should be legal or not. I personally don't consider the downloading of files a crime, and consider the ruckus made by the media corporations nothing more than an unwillingness to adapt its product to a new market. Instead of looking to their product as a cause for dropping sales, they are blaming it on the consumers.

It is roughly the equivalent to sitting in a debate and defending the salaries of IT personnel the day after the IT bubble burst. The market has changed, and the media companies need to adopt. I believe the reason the media industry is losing money is because of the higher availability of their product. The higher the availability and the bigger the quantity of a good, the lower the market price will tend to be. Since more music has been made more available to more people, it is no longer considered worth paying, for instance, 20 dollars for a CD. Failure to adapt to these new conditions has made the media companies lose money, and has in fact helped propagate file sharing.

Also, the police raid was allegedly performed by 50 police officers, in order to seize some servers and bring three people to the police station to be interrogated. This was an absurd demonstration of state force. After all, these people were hardly terrorists, and the servers could hardly be considered weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the founders of The Pirate Bay have, unlike many other bit torrent trackers and file sharing sites, held a high profile and made no secret of what they were doing.

But wait, it gets even more absurd. One of the accused, Mikael Viborg, who is the legal advisor of The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån, was forced to give a DNA sample to the police (Swedish only)! When asked why he had to give a DNA sample, he received no answer other than that the police had the right to do so. Do the Swedish police intend to show that he has in fact been in contact with one of the allegedly illegal servers by showing that his DNA can be found on it? I strongly doubt it, but it makes you wonder what the DNA sample is to be used for. I don't know, but I do know that there is something rotten in the state of Sweden.

Notes in the margin:

Piratbyrån is now up and running as a blog on blogger.com.
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Joakim Kämpe is a software developer currently living in Stockholm, Sweden.