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Inside IT
Idealistic pirates at bay over Swedish file sharing

The founders of the bastion of large-scale file sharing have come under
attack following reports of large profits from advertising

Andrew Brown
Thursday July 27, 2006
The Guardian

The Pirate Bay, a site based in Stockholm, is one of the last hubs for
large-scale piracy using the peer-to-peer system BitTorrent. It doesn't
just encourage piracy, it glories in it, offering a search engine to help
users find pirated content, and it is closely associated with a political
party that aims to make file sharing legal in Sweden
(http://tinyurl.com/ef2rr). But its idealistic image has been dented by
the investigations of a Stockholm newspaper, which has discovered that the
company is making large sums from advertising.

The Pirate Bay's founders, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, face
prison sentences of up to two years if they are found to have profited
from copyright violations. If they had run the site as a non-profit
operation, precedent suggests they would have been only fined.

Svenska Dagbladet, a Stockholm morning paper, claims the site is making
tens of thousands of pounds every month from advertising: the firm that
handles the site's Swedish business told the Guardian that the largest ads
cost 200,000 SEK (about œ14,700) and that they had sold four of these, and
a great many smaller ads in the last month. The price has risen in the
past few weeks after the government's attempts to shut the site brought
widespread publicity.

Localised advertisements

The Pirate Bay offers services in 20 languages, two of which are forms of
Norwegian. When I was browsing, the ads were all relevant to my location
of Cambridge, England, which suggests the ads are localised through
different brokers for different locations.

The Pirate Bay was briefly closed in May by a police raid, in which all
its servers, and those of its mother company, PRQ Internet, were
confiscated; users responded generously to an appeal to replace the
servers. The appeal did not mention the site's ad revenues.

The founders are already being investigated for criminal breach of the
laws on copyright. The Pirate Bay's defence appears to be that it does not
host the files it makes available: this need not happen because of the way
the BitTorrent protocol works. It does not even host the tracker files
that keep records of where and how the files are distributed across the
net: all it does is maintain a database of trackers, using software
written by Svartholm Warg. From the user's point of view, none of this
matters: a dedicated Bit Torrent client such as Azureus, or even the Opera
browser, will pick up a file from Pirate Bay as if it were an ordinary
download, though usually much more slowly.

Some BitTorrent sites distribute only legal material. The Pirate Bay is
not one of them. I found a file that was not obviously copyrighted, but
this took some effort. Everything else was. The files are arranged in
areas including films, TV shows, music, games and applications. This tasty
menu has produced more than one million users at any one time, who had
access, last week, to more than 100,000 files.

The site became famous for its mockery of lawyers' letters. As larger and
more famous sites, such as the Slovenian Suprnova, were taken down by
copyright owners, the Pirate Bay was left as the bastion of illegality.
The only comparable large-scale source of copyrighted material is the
Russian site Allofmp3.com, but it charges for music and doesn't offer
software and video as BitTorrent sites do.

The Swedish government has enacted the EU copyright directive, which makes
file sharing a criminal offence, while at the same time spreading the
means of file sharing by its encouragement of broadband. It is one of the
most wired countries, with a high rate of broadband penetration. More than
three million people - nearly half the adult population - have broadband
at home, according to one recent survey; about one million broadband users
share files, mostly of music.

On a recent trip, I could get decent, usually free, wireless connections
almost everywhere, including at one gold-prospecting camp high above the
Arctic circle where even mobiles didn't work.

Add to that a very high rate of youth unemployment and a tradition of
cheap recorded music, and the result is a large number of people who
believe that file sharing is, or ought to be, legal. There is even a
political party standing in September's election on a programme of free
downloading for personal use and a reform of the copyright laws.

Under pressure from their youth organisations, almost all the political
parties are suggesting that copyright laws should be reformed to make file
sharing legal. They see an issue that appeals to first-time voters who
don't seem to care about anything else very much. The only party not
making these noises is the largest, the Social Democrats, which could be
evicted in what is predicted to be a very tight contest.

Hindrance

The copyright laws seem to have hindered rights owners more than file
sharers. On the net is a memorandum from Håkan Roswall, the prosecutor in
this case, who argues that Swedish copyright law does not protect American
films as it does not recognise the concept of "work for hire", under which
the people who work on them are deemed, in American law, to have handed
over their copyrights to the studio. Only computer programs are protected
in that way under Swedish law.

In the absence of explicit assignment, the copyright on an American film
is shared - in Sweden - among the director, the cameraman and even the
scriptwriter: anyone, in fact, but the producers urging the prosecution of
file sharers.

The Washington Post reported last month that it had been American pressure
on the Minister of Justice, Thomas Bodström, that led to the raid on the
Pirate Bay's servers in late May. Under another quirk of Swedish law, it
would have been a crime if he had instructed the police to raid the
company: under the constitution, ministers set strategy, not tactics, for
civil servants. He has denied doing any such thing.

The site was down for only only three days, before reappearing with a new
banner showing the pirate ship firing at a banner labelled "Hollywood".
Two websites have since appeared that claim to offer insurance against
being charged for file sharing: they offer to pay any fines. One,
Delaut.se, offers a year's protection for just over œ10. The maximum fine
for file sharing is about 250,000 SEK (œ18,400).

Given the slow speed of the Swedish justice system, the founders of the
Pirate Bay are unlikely to be charged before the autumn. But their
experience has pointed up a deep paradox. Both the broadband wiring of
Sweden and its signing up to strict international copyright laws were
carried out by governments which believe that the country can only be
rescued by market-driven growth. Instead, it has led to the discovery that
there is a huge global market in illegal software. And it won't be
idealists who supply it.

ú If you'd like to comment on any aspect of Technology Guardian, send your
emails to tech@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited ; Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006



Roy
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