In a remarkably ignorant statement, the Swedish National Prosecutor has appealed a culture-sharing sentence to the Supreme Court with the motivation that sharing culture and knowledge “funds terrorism”. This follows a verdict from the Appeals Court that would have put an end to the witch-hunt of people sharing culture in Sweden, as it had handed out a sentence that was effectively too low to justify further persecution. In appealing to the Supreme Court, Kerstin Skarp of the Swedish National Prosecutor’s Office has shown every conceivable bit of ivory-tower ignorance.
The man had been sentenced to a fine of SEK 8000 (about 900 euros) for sharing 57 movies, a fine that had been raised by the Appeals Court. Normally, that would be the end of it, and people would move on with their lives, clenching their fists in their pockets in anger that people were persecuted at all for the good deed of sharing culture and knowledge (even if the risk of being indicted remains lower than being struck by lightning).
However, this verdict posed a problem for the copyright monopoly extremists, as it prevented the police from raiding ordinary people’s homes to collect evidence of sharing culture: only crimes that carry a jail sentence are proper grounds for a search warrant in Sweden. This verdict was a fine, not a jail sentence. Thus, this verdict carried a promise that it would mean an end to the persecution of the 250 million Europeans and 150 million Americans that do the good act of sharing culture and knowledge – well, at least, it would mean an end to the persecution in Sweden, unless somebody would voluntarily confess to this non-crime on the rare occasion.
Deputy National Prosecutor (vice riksåklagare) Kerstin Skarp would have none of it. In a remarkably ignorant appeal to the Supreme Court, sent directy from the office of the National Prosecutor, she urges the Supreme Court to overturn the verdict of the Appeals Court and issue a jail sentence, so that the persecution can continue. She justifies this with the opinion that sharing culture is a crime that is dangerous to the fabric of society (Swedish samhällsfarlig), a word normally reserved for system-threatening crime such as Hells Angels and large-scale police bribery. But she doesn’t stop there. Apparently, people sharing movies with one another is what funds terrorism. From the appeals document (in Swedish):
I don’t know where to start. The logic of how a generous act of sharing, where no money is involved, is able to fund anything at all (which, you know, requires money in the first place?) is completely absent from the reasoning. It is a paper filled to the brim with corporate scaremongery bullshit, deliberately trying to tie honest people sharing knowledge and culture with one another to terrorists killing children for political gain.
This individual – Kerstin Skarp – is seriously dangerous to Swedish society, for real, in her position as Deputy National Prosecutor. She needs to step down or be fired immediately, having shown this kind of disastrously bad judgment, and there probably needs to be picketing outside her house until that happens.
If anybody should desire to discuss this issue further with Deputy National Prosecutor Kerstin Skarp (which I would encourage), she can be reached at e-mail [email protected] (writing in the body text that the mail is addressed to Kerstin Skarp) or by phone, to the switchboard of the National Prosecutor’s Office at +46 10 562 50 00.
Shame, Kerstin Skarp. Seriously – your actions draw shame over your office, your person, and your country.
A couple of things;
1. Since when is Hells Angels a crime? 😉
2. No, we should not picket her house, we should picket where she works. Otherwise we are bad people.
3. You do understand where the “confusion” is coming from right? It’s the good ol’ IP-combo. You throw in all the different Imaginary Properties and all the people supposedly affected by them (poor grocery employees), and claim that it’s all the same.
There may be something to the claim that BUYING bootlegs helps fund organized crime, but as far as I know organized crime syndicates rarely like terrorism. It’s bad for business.
When something like this happens, you need to up the ante. She is clearly not acting within the reasonable boundaries of her office, but using her position to push a personal agenda – in other words, she already made it personal.
I still feel we should take the high road, otherwise we end up looking like the thugs they paint us as.
Were I in Sweden, I would be happy to join a moving picket of wherever she happened to be at any given time.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I doubt the prosecutors Kerstin Skarp and My Hedström are doing this for personal gain. They most likely believe it’s their job to maximize the persecution of culture-sharers. That is, probably neither of them has a personal agenda, but both of them would definitely have been unable to see the emperor’s new clothes, if he’d had any.
Might even be as simple as that they’re doing it because it’s gona look good on their CV’s later on if they’re up for promotion^^
What if we judge these actions by their material results rather than by the intentions behind them?
I agree. We must make it personal, we must attach a personal price tag to undemocratic actions. There must be a personal cost, or things will not change.
Besides, we didn’t start the trip along that particular road. They raised the stakes a long time ago, by such measures as the attack against the people behind TPB and a lot of other actions against specific individuals. We are simply calling it.
Yes. Let’s up the ante. What a wonderful suggestion.
I suggest we all wear identical purple clothes with purple masks over our heads and build enormous wooden copyright symbols turned upside down that we place and put on fire outside the houses of the people we deem enemies of the society.
Escalation is limitation. War is peace. Education is ignorance.
Rick, honestly. If you don’t see a problem with escalation where the family and neighbors to these persons will turn into innocent victims you’re crossing an unforgivable border and will yourself turn into an opposing danger to the society. You will taste lite, feel like and become your enemy.
Also, not only will you turn the innocent into collateral damage, you will also give your opponent, people like Kerstin Skarp, an even bigger lever to up their ante and thus force yourself to up your ante until it all turns into a spiraling effect of self amplifying force multiplication.
This is the dynamic of wars. Wars don’t have winners, wars only have losers. We all know you can do better than that.
See my response to Anna below.
Cheers,
Rick
>1. Since when is Hells Angels a crime? 😉
Hell’s Angels chapters are, at least over here in Australia, thoroughly intertwined with illegal activities (as are several other notorious Bikie gangs). They’re not even really front organisations for the underlying gang: the club officials are the gang officials, the club structure is the gang structure, pretty much. It is bad english, but the meaning is pretty clear.
That doesn’t make “Hells Angels” a crime. At most you could argue that being a member of Hells Angels was a crime, although I wouldn’t agree with you there.
Hell’s Angels is a mature and pure criminal organization. Nothing cool or romantic about them, you see.
In Sweden there are numerous examples of HA’s criminal activities all over the scale, often including severe violence.
A lot of HA members and their prospects consequently spend a lot of time in Swedish prisons.
The only reason why HA is not declared an illegal organization in Sweden (like in Germany) is that HA therefore still is allowed to walk around with their vests, making it easer for both the Police and citizens to spot HA members when they show up.
Prohibiting HA as an organization would force them to hide underground and make those stupid egocentric bastards far more difficult to trace.
[…] Someone said: “In a remarkably ignorant statement, the Swedish National Prosecutor has appealed a culture-sharing sentence to the Supreme Court with the motivation that sharing culture and knowledge “funds terrorism”.” …http://falkvinge.net/2013/05/13/swedish-national-prosecutor-says-culture-sharing-must-be-punished-ha… […]
Sweden is the first of the new Soviet states.
That was… ehm… Just dumb.
What?
Is it? What about England?
every time a file is shared, a puppy is blown up by Al Qaeda 8-(
intellectual property is intellectual theft
If we were to accept the often used claim that terrorists fund their activities by selling products which infringe copyright, there would be two logical conclusions:
1. Copyright helps terrorists, because it gives them an avenue of funding.
2. Sharing in a way which infringes copyright hinders terrorists, because it undercuts them and makes it harder for them to fund themselves.
In short, if you want to prevent terrorism, you should be encouraging the sharing of culture.
Conceivably it is because using pirated sites, like streaming sites, give them ad revenue, which they give to terrorism. I don’t think this is the case in any significant amount, there is much more money in selling illegal drugs for terrorists. But at the very least, it is a possible mechanism without paying.
Yes money gathered from Ads could be used to do illegal things. But so could any money gotten from any kind of transaction… If people need perfect information to dare do transactions – society will slow down to a halt. Everyone will do as little as possible because of fear of interacting with the “wrong guy” and becoming blamed for funding his crime.
I could buy a pizza, and what if that guy then goes and buys a gun with all that pizza money and shoots someone, then I funded his crime.
[…] senaste dumheterna från Riksåklagarens kontor får i varje fall en musikälskare som undertecknad att relatera till, […]
“medför att undermåliga och farliga produkter kommer ut på marknaden”
Yeah, copyright har ju verkligen hindrat Microsoft från att släppa undermåliga och farliga produkter. Eller nåt…
And today John Kerry swings by. Connect the dots.
Yay, so you haven’t been van’d yet for your article about the TSA!
Shame she didn’t mention how filesharing harms children, that would have been a clichè overflow.
That article was written by Travis McCrea. I hope he hasn’t been van’d.
[…] cibler les copies physiques et non en ligne, l’amalgame peut néanmoins être fait. Richard Falkvinge, le fondateur du Parti Pirate suédois, estime d’ailleurs que la logique de Kerstin Skarp […]
Hey Rick can I get a link to the picture on top of this article?
It’s the Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel, by Henry Vidal in Tuileries Garden in Paris, France
Hi Rick,
This blog post made me quite concerned and uneasy and not only because the idea of prison for file sharing is ludicrous. You did a wonderful thing when you started the first Pirate Party in Sweden. You were one of the pirates that convinced me to become a pirate and for that I am, and will always be, very grateful.
However, it pains me quite a bit to see that you a seriously suggesting that we should morph into some pirate version of the Westboro Baptist Church and picket our opposition’s homes. It means crossing a very important line.
1. Any sane person would find it pretty threatening to have angry people picketing their home. We pirates always talk about how horrible the copyright industry is when it uses threat to get what they want. How horrible are we if we stoop to their level?
2. Some people may find it “right” to picket a person whose views they don’t agree with. I don’t, but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that I do. So what? There is still bound to be a lot of collateral damage in the form of the husband/wife/partner and kids of the person they don’t like. There’s neighbours, etcetera. What have they done to deserve an angry mob outside their house? What does it say about us pirates, if we start accepting collateral damage on some guilt by association ground?
3. What is the benefits of picketing someone’s home? Well, I guess it would blow off some steam for some people, but at what cost? You taught me that politics is a spectator’s sport. So, what do you think that spectators think about people who picket someone’s home? I suspect most people feel what you and I feel when we see the Westboro Baptist Church picket gay people’s funerals with “God hate fags!” signs. The great difference between a crazy fundamentalist church and us is that … well, we are not crazy fundamentalists, of course … but also that we need to get votes. We can’t afford that people think we are crazy. We need people’s votes to change the world for the better, and we’re not going to get them if they see us as lunatics harassing people in their homes.
4. And if we were to disregard the fact that picketing homes are quite threatening, if we were to decide to not give a fuck about the collateral damage and the fact that we need to look fairly sane to get votes, what then? Where would it stop? Are there any limits to what rights we can give ourselves to punish people who don’t share our views?
This is a comment field from TorrentFreak a while back: http://annatroberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/tf_mw.jpg People suggest raping Hollywood’s lawyer in the Pirate Bay case “to show her” and got thumbs up from everywhere. I protested and told them off, but I fear I was mostly regarded as an old crone who did not understand the “fun” of the idea of raping sense into someone. What message does that send to sensible men and women who are interested in our political ideas? I would guess: “Get the hell out of here, these people are crazy!” and that is a little bit too contra-productive for my liking.
Rick, you are, as am I, a leader and role model of the Pirate Party movement. People look up to us and model their own behaviour on what we do. Rest assured that there will always be people that don’t know where and when to stop if we start stooping to threats and accepting collateral damage to get our way. We need to set a good example. Picketing peoples homes is not a good example.
Pirates are smart people. We have much better tools in our toolbox. Let’s use them instead.
And, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to debate this and other interesting things further, when we meet up for one of our nice coffee breaks soon again. 🙂
Anna
————————–
Anna Troberg
Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party
http://www.annatroberg.se
Hi Anna, good to hear your thoughts!
The Pirate Party was founded on the key insight that the game is rigged, the dice are loaded, the decks are stacked, and the odds are fixed. You cannot make a difference and change the world unless you go outside of the normal game and make it personal for the wrongdoers. I’ve told that history of the party’s founding in countless interviews – the one key reason was that you needed to take it out of the politicians’ professional sphere and into their personal sphere if you wanted change.
You cannot change the system if you don’t hold individual wrongdoers accountable. Pointing fingers is not enough – you need to push, no, shove them out of their comfort zone. You need to make them learn that demonizing an entire generation has consequences, not just to their office, but to them – just like we forced politicians to learn that same thing.
I am still convinced this is necessary. Here, you have an official who wants to raid the homes of three million people in Sweden, using the threat of gunpoint violence. I find it completely reasonable to show up at her home with media and tell that exact story to the cameras – how it’s necessary to show officials the effect of the decisions they are making way up in their ivory tower. As always, you need to be a first-mover; we have been the first to use many efficient campaign methods (mailing Swedish MPs, rallying outside of Parliament, sending flowers by the metric fuckton to people who do the right thing, etc.) that have become standard operating procedure for lobbying after we pioneered them. You need to stay one step ahead of the mainstream; you need to be unpredictable and make steps that are newsworthy as well as unexpected.
I am somewhat surprised by your rape analogy. I have been absolutely adamant that non-violent methods are absolutely key, and that I see it as my mission in life to prevent this conflict from descending into open violence. That analogy strikes me as an unusually dishonest strawman; you cannot possibly have believed that I wanted somebody with differing opinions (or even corrupt sons of bitches in office who cause honest people to burn) to actually get hurt, physically hurt. I can’t reasonably believe I have ever expressed something that could remotely have been interpreted that way.
This is not about picketing a funeral of somebody who died doing a good job in service just to piss people off and get advertising revenue (as in Westboro). This is about showing media and those anonymous, normally protected officials what their decisions really mean, and doing so in a way that will deliberately make them think twice before making decisions that demonize millions of people in the future, all while doing nothing but exercising free speech rights.
I remain convinced that you can’t change a game with loaded dice, stacked decks and fixed odds without singling out individuals in the corrupt system and holding them visibly accountable for their actions.
Still, one of the beauties of the swarm is that ideas are evaluated collectively. I may be wrong – I sometimes am, and I expect to be from time to time, just as I expect others to be from time to time. If anybody thinks that I or anybody else has nothing but good ideas and must be followed unquestioned, they need to come right back down to Odin’s green earth and realize that nobody’s idea is worth more than anybody else’s, and that we’re all trying to find the most effective way of changing the world in an open battleground of ideas on how to move the next chess piece.
Cheers,
Rick
Rick, the problem is that by “go outside of the normal game” you are still playing by “their” rules. You gain nothing by following their morally questionable methods, on the contrary you lose the moral higher ground.
This will reflect badly on yourself when outsiders look at the fight. Instead of seeing a fight where one side fight dirty they will se a fight where both sides don’t care whatever methods are used as long as they give results. This will result in fewer people joining the fight (or vote on PP), not more!
To make things worse neither you, I, PP or anyone has the resources to fight dirty. Our only weapon is higher moral ground. Erode that and you erode all chances of victory.
Hi Rick!
So, I, of course, have a few points. You know I always do. 🙂
So, let’s get the strawman out of the way, once and for all. The concept of a slippery slope is something we have taked a lot about over the years in the context of how surveillance society is built, one little step at a time. When you start shifting boundaries, you also make it easier to shift the next and the next. The same goes for issues like these. If we shift boundaries and allow ourselves the freedom to disregard rules that we think should apply to others, then others will continue shift the boundaries a little bit more and a little bit more. Give it some time, and someone along the line does not have any concept of when enough is enough. There is of course quite a few steps in between, but showing up at someones home because they have other views of the world and talking about “raping sense” into people” is still on the same slippery slope. So, no. This is not a straw man. This is the concept of a slippery slope in action.
There are many ways of making someone personally responsible, without showing up at their home, violating the pirate core value that the integrity of someone’s home is sacred. If I feel I have to bend what I believe in to reach my goal, I’ll find another and better way of doing it.
There are many ways of making someone personally responsible without taking actions that run a high risk of collateral damage. If I run the risk of harming innocent people, I will find another and better way.
There are other ways of making someone personally responsible, than becoming their judge and jury and punish them by showing up on their doorstep. If people around me start doing that, I will find another and better way.
What you are suggesting is in effect to scare people with different opinions to silence. For me, that is not what being a pirate is about. For me, being a pirate is about giving people a better alternative, giving people knowledge, making sure that everyone is entitled to their day in court, if they are accused of something.
There is a lot of space and opportunity between “being mainstream” and being a fundamentalist. Everything is not black or white. If I only see black and white, I take a step back and look again. There is always many shades of grey. Much more than fifty, even. 😉
You write that you can’t win a game with “loaded dice”. Well, you can’t win a game by becoming your opponent either. Well, we’ve all seen Star Trek. Being part of the hive mind is not really defeating the Borg, is it? :-p
Toodles,
Anna
———————————————-
Anna Troberg
Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party
Thank you Troberg. Since Falkvinge is currently rage tripping could I get your opinion on this: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130511/03220823047/mpaa-freaks-out-insists-that-having-to-consider-fair-use-before-filing-dmca-takedown-would-be-crazy.shtml
is this prosecutor going to put oil company execs behind bars because their product causes Global Warming and other pollution? whoever this person is, the entertainment industries have definitely done a good job of bribing her. if she is so concerned about how terrorism is being funded, why doesn’t she try to go after terrorists? what she is doing is making it so obvious that her loyalties are to the USA entertainment industries rather than to her own people and doing her job correctly of prosecuting those who commit serious crimes. if there were terrorists involved, i think an idiot could see that there would be a bit more going on than the sharing of a few movies!! she isn’t, by any chance, related to the entertainment industries judge that sat on TPB spectrial, is she?
If i willingly share my knowlede of how to:
adjust a sniper rifle
make eksplosives
fix a radio
setup a computer
hack a firewall
make poison
wouldnt that endanger the lives of many ?
and be very usefull to terrorists ?
Yes it most certainly could do some intellectual funding.
So when the ex-chairman of the swedish piracy party whines –
its just a matter of how he tries to twist actual facts –
all in order to gain the trust of immature young people –
and their votes not to forget!
Is that to be expected from someone,
that has his own personnal point of view about sexual
age of consent?
I guess so!
Oh, man. It’s a bit of a shame I don’t have a more active comment field – I would need buckets of popcorn just to see this piece of drivel being ripped to shreds if had been posted on, say, Reddit.
If you don’t willingly share your knowledge of how to:
adjust a sniper rifle, the terrorist will still go look for a professional sniper to teach them because nothing beats having an experienced teacher;
make explosives, the terrorist will still seek out a competent bomb maker sympathetic to their cause because bomb making is tactile work that requires experience to get right instead of you know blowing yourself up because you thought you could just cook up a bomb with a recipe you got out of Anarchist’s Cookbook, it does not work that way. Most people who just try to make a bomb with a formula and without any training or experience blow themselves up, actually the most common way for even experienced bomb makers to die is to get blown up by their own bombs;
fix a radio, the terrorists usually just find the first radio enthusiast that has the same convictions as they do, in case you missed it fixing a radio has been common knowledge for at least 60 years now, long before the whole internet thing;
setup a computer, they will still send one of their own to get computer training or get one of those people that answer your questions about your computer and is sympathetic to their cause to help them out with their own computers. Did you forget that your computer customer service gets exported to third world countries?
hack a firewall, ?? You are aware that most hackers do not in fact hack firewalls? They hack human behavior either by tricking people to type in their passwords into some kind of proxy, or by spinning all the standard passwords or by just combing trough all the letter combinations up to 5 digits because you see most people do not keep their data safe because no one told them that before a hacker tries to hack a firewall he will try to trick his target into letting them in around that same firewall or check if the target has made their password easy to learn and type (all of my passwords are at least over 15 characters long and most go over 20 and the effort to come up with such passwords I can remember is worth it for the extra security) or if none of the above works the hacker will go look for an easier target before they try to hack a firewall and even then any hacker who has the know how to break into a firewall has usually studied programing and has a good understanding of the theory and practical use of it. Or to put it simply: any hacker who can hack a firewall knows how a firewall works, this means that even if you took away the knowledge of how firewalls work and kept draconian punishment around to keep that knowledge secret it would get out sooner or latter either by someone figuring out how to hack a firewall on the outside trough talent and luck or by someone from the inside being disgruntled and seeding this info trough underground channels;
make poison, then people won’t know how to make the antidote for it or what chemicals being bought in a certain sequence should set of alarm bells. You do know that right? It is in the interest of the poison maker that people do not know how a certain poison is made or what are its properties or people will know how to make either an antidote or poison vaccine or failing both they can at least keep an eye out for various components of said poison and test the food/water/area of entry for the VIP for traces of the poison or its byproducts;
wouldn’t you not telling people how a terrorist can attack them (like the US is doing right now?) endanger a lot more lives?
And be very useful for the terrorists so they can hide their preparations for a terrorist attack easier?
Yes it most certainly could do some intellectual funding. ???
Timmy as your teacher I have no idea what you wanted to say here so I must ask you to stop eating your own words in your throat and also: English motherfucker do you spell it?
So when the ex-chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party is rage tripping , and yes you are rage tripping Falkvinge because if you were not you would realize that instead of asking for a picketing you should have gone and organized a coordinated writing and mailing of letters from all the pirates and pirate supporters to her office to tell Skarp and her office in their own words, without treats or crudeness why they think that she is wrong and why they should be looking into what they consider to be real cyber-crimes. Also when I said coordinate I mean work out the time window for people all over Sweden to send these letters in so that they get to Swedish National Prosecutor’s office more or less at the same time. There is a difference in an impression a lot of e-mails in someones inbox leaves on a person and the impression a mountain of letters in their mailbox leaves on a person when they see it. Also no spamming with this tactic, each person should write ONE letter and send it to the Prosecutor’s office. Do not invade Skarp’s personal space, instead physically show her office exactly how many people are considering this the wrong type of action to take;
It’s just the matter of the fact that Falkvinge reads tired from the fight and is not attempting to do anything other then preach to the choir;
All in order to inform us and get our outrage over this absurdity, you really should start getting our point across to people who do not know that this is wrong and are not aware that they should be siding with us instead of you know rage tripping Falkvinge;
He gets our votes anyway because the Pirate Parties are the only one currently with an open internet friendly platform, what he usually does when not rage tripping is encourage each and every one of us to go out and talk to people who are not already politically invested in the Pirate cause and explain to them in their own language why they should side with the Pirates.
Is that to be expected from someone, (insert you own Ad hominem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem ) fallacy here) that has his own personal point of view about sexual age of consent? You are aware there is no consensus on the sexual age of consent: some countries say 16 others 15 or 17 or 18 or 21.
And what do you guess? What previous experience of your own or society’s are you drawing on to validate you statement about Falkvinge? Because I have no idea what you are talking about with you Ad hominem attack.
[…] dagsböter i hovrätten dömd fildelares fildelning av lite filmer med finansiering av exempelvis Al-Qaida’s operationer & vapeninköp för att få Högsta Domstolen att pröva […]
men det är ju inte vice Riksåklagaren som skrivit det som är citerat. sorgligt näthat.
[…] HD och visar utan minsta lilla tvivel om saken att Riksåklagaren vill få Högsta domstolen att tänka Al-Qaida, finansiering av Al-Qaida o.s.v när HD ska ta ställning till om fildelningsdomen i hovrätten ska prövas eller […]
[…] terroristslägga mot fildelningen att framstå precis exakt så löjlig som den är. Debattartikeln ifråga är […]
Hi there, everything is going nicely here and ofcourse every one is sharing data, that’s in fact good, keep up writing.