Oscar Swartz Global Texplorer

Pirate Bay: Political slurs and pictures

I have reported every day from The Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm, Sweden, for WIRED.com. I wrote twelve articles. Here is a list of them all. Not every single word is mine. These blog postings are edited by WIRED, like magazine articles. Small mistakes occur but nothing substantial.

Andrew Orlowski wrote a piece for The Register which I get questions about so I may as well respond to it here. [By the way, my name is Oscar Swartz, not Oscar Schwartz].

Orlowski's piece is an attack on me, as a special correspondent reporting for WIRED. I am a self-confessed intellectual property critic and "activist". Orlowski writes:

"When you invite activists to do your reporting for you, you can be sure that if a fact has an unpleasant odour, it won't be reported - no matter how important it may be", Orlowski ends his piece.

So what is this hugely important fact? Well, according to Orlowski, it is one of the defendants', Carl Lundström's, alleged political views and history.

"But the presence of this significant national political player hasn't been worthy of a WiReD mention since the trial kicked off.", writes Orlowski.

In fact I mentioned Lundström's past in this WIRED posting: "Lundström is the odd man among the defendants. As heir to the Swedish Wasa Bread empire, he's an independently wealthy and slightly eccentric business man. His detractors point to a past in nationalist politics. Lundström is named in the case because he owned an ISP from which two other Pirate Bay defendants purchased co-location and bandwidth." [added bold face]

That sentence, written by me, judges the relevance of Lundström's politics in a correct way. It is irrelevant!

Lundström owned and managed a middle-sized Swedish ISP where technician Fredrik Neij was employed. In his spare time, Fredrik was a technician for The Pirate Bay.

In the ISP business it is not uncommon to let your technicians do little side projects. Neij's employer Lundström let him use rack space and bandwidth, "sponsoring" the site. Lundström testified that he considered becoming deeper involved but his business lawyers adviced against it because they thought there might be legal troubles later, after Swedish copyright laws were changed on July 1, 2005. Before that point the activities were unquestionably legal. After that: According to the defense, yes! According to the prosecutor, no!

Orlowski is a remote commentator that has read some story on the net. In fact Lundström has never been "a significant national political player" in Sweden. He is basically unknown. I know Swedish politics. I live there. I am a writer and commentator and social critic in Sweden. The largest Lundström interview and story was done by Magasinet Filter, later republished in large daily Svenska Dagbladet . Lundström calls himself a "nationalist and protectionist, but not a racist". But he has supported and participated in fringe nationalist politcal circles, some of them branded "neo-nazi", that is true. At the same time he is married to a jewish woman.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pirate Bay.

Andrew Orlowski gets many things wrong: "Lundström is alleged to own 40 per cent of The Pirate Bay - the largest share - and gave it servers and bandwidth to get going.". Really? I have followed The Pirate Bay and written about them for 3-4 years and read a lot of media coverage about them and don't recognize that figure. What's the source of this "alleged" 40 % ? If he said 8,25 % I would know where it came from.

The prosecutor has worked for 2,5 years after the raid and went through thousand of pages of documents. He refers to a paper where Gottfrid, Fredrik, Peter and Israeli internet advertising whiz Oded Daniel for the first time seems to start a firm where the Pirate Bay activities would be managed. In this document they allocate 8,25 % of ownership to an unnamed party who has not signed the document. The prosecutor claims this is Lundström. The signatories claim the firm never started in reality but that the project just dissipated and Lundström vehemently denies that he has any "ownership" of the site but that his (former) ISP was paid market prices for hosting and bandwidth after that first time of sponsorship. Let's see what the court makes of this.

So why do certain people find that they have to prominently point out Lundström's political views? Orlowski is not the first. Big Swedish authors and columnists who hate file-sharing and have extremely traditional views on intellectual property and Internet has used it, possibly advised by PR bureaus hired by Hollywood. As a beating stick. As a slur. In order to direct attention in another direction than what intellectual property in a digital networked society means.

The main guys in The Pirate Bay affair have expressed widely divergent political views.

The Pirate Bay was started in 2003 by the Swedish open-culture activist community called The Pirate Bureau, consisting of geeks, artists, intellectuals, youth, activists, students. The leading voice of the organization worked as a journalist for left-syndicalist paper Arbetaren ("The Laborer") even though he or the organization was not involved in traditional politics at all. Rasmus Flesicher is a leading intellectual in the Pirate Bureau and in Sweden.

Fredrik Neij of The Pirate Bay has never commented politics or ideology as far as I know. Two of the others have:

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg with the only magazine he reads on paper, he claims: The Economist. More info on my Flickr page. Photo: Oscar Swartz.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg claims to be one of the 202 persons in all of Sweden who voted for "The Classical Liberal Party" in 2006. Here with Henrik Alexandersson of Frihetsfronten ("The Freedom Front"), a libertarian discussion club. More info on my Flickr page. Photo: Oscar Swartz.

Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay, sitting, is a vegan and is leaning towards Miljöpartiet, The Green Party, but here seen with Rick Falkvinge, the leader of Piratpartiet, The Pirate Party, which is going for the EU parliament in the election this year. More info on my Flickr page. Photo: Oscar Swartz.

The U.S. election: What it was all about

This is a pictorial posting. Look at the pictures below! The U.S. election wasn´t really about the economy or terrorism or tax cuts for the working class versus wealthy investors, about health care for everyone or for those with employers that pay. Sure, it was about those things too. But it was more about the following. What kind of world makes you excited? In what kind of world do you want to live? What makes you tick? My personal method to find out what it was all about is to look at the places that gave the strongest support to the respective candidates. What kind of people and places did really want McCain & Palin? And what kind of people and places did really want Obama & Biden? I used the presidential election map in New York Times, broken down to county level. I have not studied every detail but I believe I have identified the areas with the heaviest support for each candidate. I focus on regions and pick a picture of a typical place in each region. Where do you want to live and what do you feel for other people living there? That's the question. The photos below are deep-linked. For attribution and license, click on photo. Then you will also find more information about the specific photo and place:

---

The World of McCain

His heaviest support comes from the Texas panhandle (where alcohol is banned) and neighboring counties in Oklahoma (which was, by the way, the only state where all counties were won by McCain) and north into Kansas. Roberts County, Texas, 92.1 % McCain: Northern Alabama and Georgia. Blount County Alabama, 84.2 % McCain: Southern Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Northern Florida - old Ku Klux Klan strongholds went for McCain. George County, Mississippi, 82.1 % McCain: Southwestern Kentucky and Tennessee just love McCain. Jackson County, Kentucky, 84.4 % McCain: The prairies of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and The Dakotas are conducive to great feelings for McCain. 75-80 % support is common. In areas where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (= the Mormons) dominate support is extra strong. Madison County, Idaho, 85.2 % McCain:

---

The World of Obama

Support in and around the capital is strong. Washington is also a very african-american city. Washington DC, 92.9 % Obama: About 75 % of the people in the whole Bay Area, with Silicon Valley and world-leading universities like Stanford och Berkeley support Obama. San Francisco County, California, 84.7 % Obama: The Boston area is big on Obama. 77.5 % in Suffolk County (= Boston). Neighboring city Cambridge hosts two of the world's greatest universities and knowledge producers, Harvard and MIT. Cambridge, Massachusetts 87.1 % Obama: Seattle, Washington, lends great support for Obama in the northeast. It is even stronger in Portland, Oregon. Multnomah County, Oregon, 77.7 % Obama: His home city of Chicago of course supports Obama. But also industrial cities in "the rust belt" as Detroit. Wayne County, 74.2 % Obama: The most exciting and diverse place on earth, New York, supports Obama like almost no other city. New York County (= Manhattan), New York, 85.1 % Obama:

---

I once met a guy from rural Texas in New York. He had moved in order to study to become a Medical Doctor. His whole family and circle of "friends" had told him that they would never, ever visit him. NEVER! I was shocked, since New York was the greatest place on earth to me. "Yes, to you", he said. "But for a big part of America it represents hell. To them it is pure decadence and filth and immorality. They love guns as much as they hate minds.". Personally I voted for the Pirate Party in the latest Swedish election for parliament. Their view of the digital society revolves around openness and freedom of communications. Tolerance and co-existence. Almost all other parties see the digital networked society as a threat. A threat to the state. A threat to culture. A threat to children. A threat to the powers that are used to be in command. That's why they want insularity and control (and more power to the copyright industries instead of e.g. discussing adaption of copyright laws to internet society). The gun instead of the mind. By the way, I had missed that the great mind of Vint Cerf had actually just come out and endorsed Obama when we met at that luncheon here in Sweden. I guess he also prefers minds to guns.

Chief Internet Evangelist

Chief Internet Evangelist is a very expressive title. This is what Google calls Vint Cerf, who now works for them. He was the keynote speaker at Internetdagarna, Sweden's most important yearly Internet conference, arranged by the Foundation for Internet Infrastructure, that runs the Swedish ccTLD, country code top level domain, .SE (and where I myself participated in a panel). Afterwards Google arranged an informal but very cozy and rewarding luncheon with Vint Cerf. Photo(s):

(At the end the names of the participants are found.) We were asked to present ourselves and I called myself Chief Internet Freedom Acticvist. Not entirely wrong :) And it made Vint Cerf talk about the philosophy that I sometimes call the "soul of the net" (and which Rasmus Fleischer of the Pirate Bureau calls the ontology of the net).

"The democratic style was the purpose", Cerf claimed. "We wished it to be available everywhere. There would be no patents and we never asked the military permission before we sent the specifications out into the world. Nobody noticed!" "The idea was that you should be able to build your own network and connect to the existing network without asking for permission". "A very important effect of this openness has been to push development of new software and appliations out into the edges of the network. Everyone can develop applications without asking for permission from anyone which has resulted in enormous creativity and development. The innovation comes from users themselves."

Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, met Vint Cerf (who was chairman of ICANN for 7 years but not anymore, even if Bildt writes that) and worried about Sweden's slide from the top of Internet countries. I am not so sure. World Economic Forum ranks Sweden number two in the world. We are doing very well. At the lunch session I claimed that we are leading the world when it comes to affirming the new world opened up by the net: We have the first Pirate Party of the world, a cultural movement called the Pirate Bureau, the leading torrent site in the world, The Pirate Bay, a very loud opposition against state surveillance of internet traffic and so forth. I was a little surprised that Cerf purshed Amitai Etzioni's book Limits to Privacy as reading in the privacy area. I have not read it but from my economics period of my life I know Etzioni as the grand old man of communitarianism. It is quite different from the freedom-loving libertarianism that is normally connected to Internet values. It stresses the value of "the community" rather than the individual. Well, I love the Internet since I believe it can enhance understanding between people just by exposing the whole range of human possibilities for others. And in personal life many internet "liberatarians" are community-oriented who love sharing. But I can see the book as quite useful. In order to win political points it may be necessary to use rhetorics that are more collectively based. Etzioni has four criteria for when a community may impose restrictions on privacy. The first two are very relevant for the current FRA debate in Sweden: General interception of all Internet traffic that cross the border by Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA). These points have never been investigated: "First, is there a "well documented and macroscopic threat to the common good, not merely a hypothetical danger?" If so, what are the available options for dealing with that danger without first resorting to restrictions on privacy?". I mentioned Etzioni's reasoning today at the conference Internetdagarna where I participated in a panel about FRA with paf, Daniel Westman and Fredrik von Essen, moderated by Johan Hallsenius. For the Swedes, primarily: Around the table above we have, starting with the guy whose finger you see by the little mobile screen in the foreground. Jussi Karlgren, Christer Berg (arm and legs), Stefan Görling, Sofia Nerbrand, Rasmus Fleischer, Vinton G Cerf, Richard Gatarski (hidden), Peter Nou, Erik Starck, Fredrik Wass, Per Gudmundson. Completely invisible are Urban Lindstedt and myself. And, yes, I write this in English since Vint Cerf commented that me and others were taking photos with mobile phones and went talking about new behaviors through new technology and also asked to have links to blogs sent. Not that I believe he will read this, information overload is the problem of the net, rather than lack of incentives to create :)

Mayday Mayday! Internet Wall of China - around Sweden!

Reposting, since the article has been updated for international readers. The parliamentary vote is over and the results, analysis and comments occur at the end.

---

Hello world! (Also published on my Swedish main blog). This may be one of the last messages to be sent from Sweden before the Parliament forces all the big Internet and Telecom providers to send a copy of all their traffic to a state run surveillance central. Without any rational reason for it. Vague arguments about terrorism. Sweden is not faced by such threats and to abolish freedom of communications is not a solution to political problems in other countries. Swedes will never be able to communicate again without a copy being sent to the state of all the traffic that passes our borders. That is a large part of what we do. Our whole lives are lived on the net today. So the state will have a direct line into our lives. The Swedish Journalist's Federation has now called every journalist in the country who can make it to personally turn up at the parliament to beg the MOPs to vote NO! This is an unprecedented manifestation in Sweden. The law was a sure thing to pass until only a week ago. Bloggers and activists have worked for months against it but mainstream media has not seen the significance of the law until the last week. We, the netizens, have now managed to whip up a firestorm and the law will probably be turned down with a very slim margin althouh 85-90 % of the people are against having their communication copied to the state and are against the law. The Swedish people is now glued to the TV screens, frighetend by the speeches they hear from half the country's politicians. We are hopeful, since the NO-sayers still stand strong. But they need all support they can get. The Journalist Federation's manifestation is a last effoert to instill faith in them. The soon-to-be-heroes need all supprt they can get. UPDATE: The ruling parties, that are supposed to be primarily "liberal" (in a European way), have managed to do cosmetic changes that satisfies some of the fiercest critics who will now vote for a compromise. They did not have the guts to say NO to their own party bosses. The deeply anti-liberal principle stands in the compromise: All our communications will be copied into a state surveillance central. Four heroes were needed to break party lines. They appeared to stand strong. But the parties of the government were psyching and pushing them until the youngest member of parliament, who is against this heinous law, was seen breaking down and crying outside the House. She obeyed. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has alienated all the liberals in the country and is generally seen as a political catastrophe. Sweden is abolishing a fundamental basis for a free society: The right to communicate without having the state snooping on you without any suspicion of a crime. General wiretapping of us all. International media must wake up and put pressure on Sweden. Help us, please!! Links in English about our situation:
EFF
EDRI
The Register
TheLocal.se
TheLocal.se
TheLocal.se
I was interviewed today by our Danish neighbors who have realized what is going on here.

---

UPDATE, June 19, 2008: The law was passed on June 18, 2008. It looked lika a coalition of individual liberal dissidents from the ruling government parties would break party lines and say NO. Unfortunately Fredrick Federley from the Center Party, a key dissident who earlier claimed that he would never support the law, unexpectedly changed his position, most likely for internal party career reasons. The largest tabloid in the Sweden put the headline "Traitor" on an article about Fredrick Federley. He was one fo the few members of the parliament who was there on a personal ticket and the reactions from his supporters are now fierce. His blog is filled with hundreds of hostile comments. The heroine that emerged from the parliamentary vote was a Liberal Party outsider who took an adamantly individualistic stance and refused to bow to the party line. Her name is Camilla Lindberg. Swedes have been sending flowers to her as if there were no tomorrow. She had to ask people to donate money instead to Reporters without Borders. Activism is boiling. There is a real confidence crisis in politics in Sweden now. Rumours of new parties and actions are filling mailing lists and blogs. A typical YouTube contribution shows how many Swedes now feel: Overrun by a government that no longer represents them. Some of the pictures inside the video shows party leaders of the government alliance.

/Oscar Swartz, Internet entrepreneur, writer and acivist

Pirate Bay vs. Denmark: Sweden reconfirms EU law

In two postings (a heavier legal one and a summary) I have claimed that Denmark breaks EU law when they make network operators directly responsible for copyright infringement through just transporting data. This clearly nullifies Article 5.1 in the Infosoc Directive, the purpose of which is to absolve network operators from such liabilities and guarantee that telecoms and ISPs can act as neutral carriers of data between third parties. (To my Swedish readers: I will blog in Swedish again, but these postings are in English since I am on an international mission in this specific question).

I cited the Swedish government when they very specifically claimed that a Danish implementation would break EU law. Their opinion was signed on March 10, 2005.

This opinion has been confirmed on Sep 3, 2007 by Cecilia Renfors, a Swedish judge and special governmental investigator who had the assignment to propose new legislation to combat unauthorized file-sharing. She produced a 379 page report, downloadable in Swedish as a PDF, called (translated) Music and film on the Internet - threat or opportunity

Source: Regeringen.se

Her main mission was indeed to nail the network operators since former Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and she saw this as a smoother way to combat file-sharing than going after the file-sharers themselves. Broadband providers are, as we know, regularly called "thieves" by the recording companies in Ifpi and RIAA.

Renfors investigated how she legally could force broadband providers to cut the lines for their own subscribers in line with Article 8.3 in the Infosoc Directive (that Denmark refers to in order to justify its rulings).

In order to propose how this could be legally done in Sweden she looked at Norway, Finland, Denmark, UK and Germany. Denmark was the only country that considers network operators committing copyright infringement from just transporting unlicensed information.

Renfors discussed this and of course came to the conclusion that it would be much easier to achieve what she wished if she could do what Denmark is doing. But would that be possible? On p. 349-350 she answers this with an affirmative NO! She cannot propose such legislation.

She refers to the former opinion by the Swedish government and reconfirms that a Danish model would NOT be compatible with Article 5.1 in the Infosoc Directive. She also repeats the opinion that the Danish way actually nullifies the whole purpose of that Article.

I am not used to cite Renfors in positive ways, since I certainly do not approve of her suggested procedures through which an ISP could be forced to cut the lines of their own subscribers. But the argument for that proposal is not that the ISP commits copyright infringement.

Additionally, Renfors never suggested blocking web sites outside the ISPs own network. Denmark does this. Such proposals would most likely break a number of Swedish laws (and Danish?), including the constitution which prohibits state censorship. It seems to me that the ability for Denmark to block access to sites outside an ISP's own network is directly related to their (unlawful) claim that a network operator commits copyright infringement in their routers.

This is clearly an occasion when copyright will undermine freedom of speech, information and communication if the carrier does no challenge the Danish law in the EC Court of Justice.

I will point to one case and leave it to the reader to think more:

There is a movement against electronic voting machines in many countries because ultimately what comes out from the "black box" depends on the software in it, making it virtually impossible to know if elections are manipulated. In the U.S. internal documents from Diebold Election Systems, a producer of these machines, found its way out on the Internet. Flaws in the design were discussed. College students started publishing the documents on their web sites and were immediately served "Cease and Desist" letters from Diebold's law firm, claiming copyright infringement with threats of lawsuits and damages. To stop facts and information from spreading. Eventually the process was unstoppable. The more legal threats, the more the documents replicated. They started appearing on file-sharing networks like Freenet och Torrent sites.

You can read the New York Times story about Diebold in an article called File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech or Chapter 7 in professor Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. (The book is freely downloadable, but we who like it and need it will find it very worthwile to buy the printed book of course. My picture of Benkler at a Stanford conference is found here).

Would it not have been easier for Diebold to send its cease and desist letters to ISPs to make them shut down access to certain web sites, torrent sites and so forth? Yes! And this is of course the whole purpose of the Danish (illegal) actions: To pepper ISPs with all these rulings so that anyone who wants to block someone from reading or seeing something eventually just have to use a lawyer who sends a letter to the ISP. Since the ISP knows that a judge would order them to do it anyway. Pirate Bay was the second instance and after the third and fourth and fifth the message would be clear. Obey lawyers!

But this danger is also the reason that EU prohibits copyright legislation or interpretation like the Danish. It is utterly important that Tele2 now appeals that court order and claims that it violates Article 5.1 in that EU Directive. The court then has to freeze the decision while it refers the case to the EC Court, the Court of Justice of The European Communities, in Luxemburg. Tele2 has talked about not wishing to take a stand between two parties, Ifpi and The Pirate Bay.

That is a completely wrong line of reasoning. I prove it in a very powerful way in an article that I wrote after we in Sweden managed to combat the Danish pest from spreading over Öresund. The background is that a Swedish ISP announced that they would "voluntarily" follow the Danish court order from September 2006 and block Russian downloading site AllofMP3.com. A campaign among site owners to block access from customers of that wishy-washy Telecom/ISP ensued. Led by The Pirate Bay! As a result of this activism from The Pirate Bay, from The Pirate Bureau, from bloggers, from me and of course from a rebellion among their own customers the ISP was forced to back down and replace its Chairman of the Board of Directors. Read it, please! (English!) It almost makes me teary-eyed, sob sob ... Tele2 now HAS TO TAKE A STAND for its own business model. And the future. Act up!