Today the founders of the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay were found guilty of the charges held against them, and they are sentenced to one year in prison and to pay an indemnity of 30 million SEK. Quite a heavy sum. Although, if the sum of the revenue everything that have passed through their website was to be summed up, it would certainly surpass that amount by a considerable amount. It is of course quite complicated to judge whether or not th sentence is fair or not. Some people argue that music (art) is free whilst some stubbornly refer to the notion of copyright.
In today’s music climate, with MySpace and foremost YouTube being a given part in almost anyone’s life possessing an age under 30, and many over that age as well for that matter, many people have a sense of music and movies as being public goods. The time when you bought things on CD or DVD is gone, many people seem to argue.
What is clear though is that the big corporates such as Warner Bros., Universal and others NEED to adjust to the new climate in this area. They cannot, quite frankly speaking, just sit and watch and expect that things will happen as they did 10 years ago. Technology, or rather the improvement of it, enables many things, file-sharing being one of them. In addition, there are bands and artists who I suppose are quite happy they got exposed on the internet with people copying their music. Without it, they wouldn’t have been known to the wider audience. The fact is that this possibility of sharing music instantly has brought about a revolution in the music industry. Something that the big corporates have not grasped.
iTunes is a perfect example, where people pay 0,99$ for every song they download. It’s legal, it’s safe, it’s convenient. So far, so good. But of course, the incentives for downloading illegaly still remain. However, the new IPRED law in Sweden, enabling corporates to look for illegal downloaders by removing all kind of anonymity on the web. This can result in legal consequences, which, I suppose can be quite massive. This is, of course, complete madness, since it fulfils one more criteria of the Zeitgeist prophesy. Now, doubtful as that movie might be, the thought of it is quite frightening. And to be fair, no argument of national security or anything else can bite on me in regards to private integrity. If we loose that, we are lost. With that gone, security amongst people soon disappears whilst fear, resentment and reluctance prevails.
sebastian contra mundum 