An update to my previous post about the Swedish Pirate Party growing after the Pirate Bay verdict.
The results from voting today has the Pirate Party winning roughly 7% of the votes in Sweden, which will allow them to gain 2 seats in the upcoming EU parliament. According to reports from Sweden, the party did quite well among the young, receiving around 19% of voters under 30. From a US perspective those numbers may not seem too significant but in a proportional representative system, it’s actually very, very good for an upstart party, although the usual caveats about the general disinterest in EU voting certainly applies. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that outrage among young Swedes over the Pirate Bay verdict did indeed cause a reaction. Whether or not the 2 Pirate Party representatives in Strassbourg can make a difference among the 725 other MEP’s remains to be seen, but if the copyright lobby expects to continue its crusade against file-trading without opposition, both legal and otherwise, they may be in for a rude awakening.
See Torrentfreak for more detailed coverage and discussion.
Being many, many timezones away from Stockholm (and having been woefully behind in blogging in general) makes anything I have to say about the guilty verdict for the Piratebay admins rather old news, but I will just reiterate my previous prediction that nothing substantive will change in the P2P or filesharing world. Most likely appeals will prevent any change from affecting Piratebay itself for quite some time, but even if that proves mistaken, there is roughly zero chance that if the Piratebay disappears it would reduce the amount of Bittorrent traffic worldwide, much less decrease the amount of copyright infringement that occurs on the Internet. Just as with previous rightsholder victories (Napster, Suprnova, Isotorrent, etc.) there will likely be evolution in the way people share files, making whatever the next mainstream avenue of piracy (usenet, directdownload, etc.) that much harder for enforcement to have any real impact.
For some other interesting analyses of the verdict, go here and here.
The other recent attention-grabbing news is the decision by TimeWarner to
back off from their initial attempt to expand their experiment in broadband caps. The Piratebay trial and the TimeWarner decision may not appear to be connected at first, but in my opinion, they actually are more related than appears at first glance. It is a little admitted fact that P2P is one of the “killer apps” for broadband, and while I don’t think people would revert back to dial-up without access to bittorrent, I do believe there is a great deal of interest in broadband throttling, caps, and metered usage because so many users do, on occasion, fileshare. The broadband ISP’s own statistics may point to a relative few users dominating traffic usage, but I suspect there are far more users who may not be downloading ripped Blu-Ray discs constantly, but still prefer to have the ability to get a TV show, album, or DVD rip every so often. My prediction is that ISPs are going to face much more resistance to any moves that smack users of caps or throttling and P2P will be one of the reasons.
Clearly not taking to heart the Leia maxim I pointed out recently, another content owner organization is taking to the legal system to solve their piracy problems. In this case, though, it is the Swedish government, on behalf of Hollywood et al., that is trying to eliminate a pesky business model upsetting technology, The Pirate Bay. Janko has the all the important information over at NewTeeVee, but to really get a flavor of events in Stockholm, everyone should check out the trial site maintained by the legendary Pirate Bureau themselves. It gives a great flavor of the intelligence, humor and overall snottiness of the Pirate Bay crew that has endeared them to millions of pirates (and others) over the last few years.
I predict two things to come from this trial.
First, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde (the three main admins behind the site) will from a media relations standpoint run rhetorical rings around their opponents. They are experts at it and the spectacle will actually be the most entertaining element of the trial, without a doubt.
Second, and more important in the long run, nothing that happens legally at the trial will make any difference in the real world. Guilty, not guilty, it won’t matter. If the Pirate Bay site is taken down, if the admins are put in jail, if they receive a huge fine, etc., it will have no material impact on the availability or speed at which illegitimate content gets shared via Bittorrent or other networks. Other sites will just pick up the slack. Nothing will be achieved, other than to create far more publicity for the site and to engender more sympathy for the admins themselves.