waffle

As of earlier today, I’m a registered (and, if they distributed them, card-carrying) member of the Pirate Party, a serious Swedish party with a realistic chance of getting something done in a position as the biggest of the new parties since the last election and a potent tiebreaker party.

What happened this past Thursday (and a few weeks before) is a disgrace to the Swedish legal system. The authorities got orders from the White House to “solve this problem once and for all”, and despite knowing that the case didn’t have a leg to stand on, sat down, took it and went through with what a foreign authority (itself influenced by a lobbying organization) told them to do. And all along this line, from what I can tell, no one stood up and said “we can’t do this”. I’m enraged - not only at my own country’s administration (which I would have voted for had I been of the requisite age at the time) but at the RIAA and also at the voters (and abstainers) in the USA, for allowing such a government to form itself.

Today’s media organizations are sat down with a truth that they don’t dare face: technology help creators enough that creating and distributing their creations doesn’t outright require the mountain of man hour effort and money that it used to. Their business model is slowly but surely sliding into obsolescence, and their half-assed efforts to modernize their business (which, actually, they don’t want, since the older model brings in more money) don’t work. Most good new business models have come from outside the traditional media business. This is about far more than copyright infringement labeled “theft”.

Are there more important and pressing issues in politics than file sharing? Without a doubt. However, the actions taken in the past few days and their effects have effectively brought the issue beyond just file sharing. It’s now about a corrupted moral in the very way our government respond to pressures from lobbying organizations in other countries; it’s about what’s happening to the personal integrity I’m guaranteed, constitutionally and otherwise; it’s about the police failing to realize (or, even worse, failing to act on the realization) that the Pirate Bay’s operation is completely legal in Sweden, in law and in repeated precedent; it’s about not taking the whole skyscraper into custody because someone on floor three is a very sketchy suspect.

It needs to be said very clearly that I, as a citizen and as a tax payer, will not put up with this kind of crap. I will put my vote in the ballot to help stop this kind of dirty game at least in Sweden on September 17.