Solid Block of Ise

I’ve been kicking this around all day. To write about this idiocy or to just ignore it? On one hand, it’s a subject that touches on my own opinions. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who’s talking about it in the old media, (i.e. newspapers) have completely lost any sense of reality. I’d be very surprised to find enough IQ to fill a tablespoon between the whole lot of them. This in turn means that I have to argue against endless stupidity, and as everyone knows, “never argue with idiots, they bring you down to their level and beat you through experience”.

But, I’m going to argue with idiots now. I feel obliged to tune in and add my voice to fray. I’m not going to be quiet today. I cannot be quiet about this any more.

First off we have Liza Marklund. I’ve hardly ever been bothered by this woman who in so many ways remind me of a swedish version of Ann Coulter, at least as far as physical appearances go. Mrs Marklund is a swedish author of fairly generic detective-novels, and this has brought her fame and fortune. I’ve only browsed through her books, but I would say that she values herself a lot higher than I think is reasonable. I’ve noticed that she’s very good at talking about herself and her “craft” or whatever the hell you want to call it. Ann Coulter however is in my opinion the spawn of some ancient evil, and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if you’d need seven tongues to pronounce her real name.

Up until just recently I’ve been very neutral in my opinion about mrs Marklund. She can write her books and go about her business, that’s basically the opinion I’ve had. At least that was until she opened that vat of stupidity that functions as her mouth, and started sprouting all kind of retarded opinions about filesharing and technology. She’s written an opinion-piece that was published in one of the major rags here in Sweden, and it reeks of stupidity. She builds a whole bunch of straw-man arguments, purposefully or maybe by accident confuses various technologies, and makes strong statements about various things she doesn’t have the slightest clue about.

In my opinion she simply writes herself off as being yet another person who stubbornly refuses to accept the reality of things, since it’s more profitable for her. She argues that filesharers are lazy thieves, and that everyone should pay money for culture. The piece she wrote is absolutely awful, and when reading it feels like something written by an angry and spoiled child.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: I completely forgot to write that mrs Marklund apparently considers libraries to also be thieves by extension of what she argues about. I tried very hard to find some kind of coherent argument in her rantings, and the only thing that she seem to stick by is that tired concept of Intellectual Property. Thus, she considers books, music and movies to be exactly that - non-existent property, owned ideas. Etc etc. Which would by extension mean that library-visitors who borrow a book is also thieves, since they’ve managed to get access to the intellectual property for free. They have gained access to the idea and even though they returned the idea (the book) they still have the memory of the idea and thus have “stolen” it. Mrs Marklund apparently has the same concept of this as the people who wanted to outlaw radio in the 1920’s since they considered radio a threat to those who sold sheet-music…

We also have Antipiratbyråns latest propaganda-piece. Antipiratbyrån is the swedish lobbying-arm for the global mediamafia. In this “article” they expunge a lot of things with very little verification. They claim to have seized some kind of server located at some kind of company. They never mention what company, what server, how they found it or even what purpose it served. For all we know they just pulled the whole “action” out of their asses, and cooked up some story to make themselves seem more successful than they are.

They claim to have dealt a severe blow to the scene, even though they don’t actually seem to know anything about how the scene operates. The article is heavily angled, and the author of it is known to sympathize and write pieces on demand for the lobby-groups.

For example, the article makes heavy use of the raid against Bahnhof a while ago. This was an incident where Antipiratbyrån together with Swedish police raided Bahnhof (a swedish very respected internet supplier) and found a large server containing pirated software, music and films. The article mentions this and claims that Bahnhof lost a lot of respect and customers from this, and generally implies that many firms are actively involved in “the scene” since they have access to hardware and fat internet connections.

What the article conveniently neglects to mention is that the server seized at Bahnhof was funded by Antipiratbyrån in order to provoke a crime! This is called entrapment and is illegal. Antipiratbyrån used an individual who was in dire financial needs and paid him off to start up the server, funded the hardware and knew exactly where it was and how it worked. This makes the whole thing even more absurd. It would be as if cops started selling drugs to people and then immediately afterwards arrested them for possession.

The article also makes some bizarre statement about how pirates generate large amounts of revenue by selling their merchandise to chinese bootleg-companies. These companies pay for pirated DVD-images that they then press on discs and sell. Pardon my french, but why in the blue fuck would this happen? Why would these chinese companies be willing to pay for something that they can just download for free from the net? It makes no sense whatsoever. This just sounds like fabricated justification in an attempt to try to gain support for themselves.

Additionally, I’m always somewhat amused when I read these things about the scene. Antipiratbyrån and RIAA/MPAA have entered themselves into a war that they cannot win. Not only are they fighting against their own potential customers, they’re also essentially fighting against a hydra when they decided to go for fighting the scene as well as their own customers. They can add the war on piracy to other laughably stupid campaigns such as the war on terror and the war on drugs. These three things are essentially like trying to have a swordfight against smoke - there’s no way you can win. They can pat themselves on the back for shutting down one release-group, but I can guarantee them that for every group they manage to “shut down” at least three or more new groups will take their place. For every head they cut off, two new ones grow out instead.

Also in the newspapers is mention of Håkan Roswall who is confident that after 14 months of investigation he now has enough proof to pursue a case against the Pirate Bay. This also makes me shake my head in amazement. What kind of evidence does he have? I don’t know how he managed to finagle some proof, but it’s about as watertight as a screendoor in my opinion. The Pirate Bay is an indexer and tracker - they don’t host any material on their own servers. If Håkan insists on trying to pursue this course of action then the next target should be Google. Google and The Pirate Bay are essentially the same thing - search engines.

UPDATE 080129: Reuters has an english-language article about this travesty here.

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