p2pnet.net News:- Hollywood loves Vikings and has made any number of highly profitable movies featuring Scandinavian sea-farers. Now, however, it’s trying to re-cast Sweden with a Caribbean look.

“Sweden has become the paradise for pirates, says the movie cartel`s Man in Sweden, Henrik Pontén of AntipiratbyrÃ¥n fame, as quoted an the International Herald Tribune story.

Antipiratbyrån is to Sweden what the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and all the other AAs are to the rest of the world.

That`s to say, it`s a thoroughly disingenuous pseudo-police organization being used by Hollywood in its ongoing, multi-million-dollar efforts to gain exclusive control of how, and by whom, files are moved around online.

The MPAA is currently going flat out to stomp BitTorrent sites and its AntipiratbyrÃ¥n clone recently admitted using a paid informer against Sweden’s Bahnhof ISP in what Banhof ceo Jon Karlung described as a “badly arranged ambush”.

He said pirated materials found on Bahnhof servers were placed there by an Antipiratbyrån stooge.

The movie industry, which is reporting mind-boggling revenues, is in the midst of using the mainstream media to claim it`s being ruined by file sharing, and that its employees are also suffering terrible hardships because of it.

The IHT story focuses on Pirate Bay servers and says the latter is, the home of the world’s busiest BitTorrent tracker – the most popular file-sharing protocol for movies and other large files and, also the most telltale sign of how otherwise law-abiding citizens in only a couple of years can turn into some of the biggest infringers, at least, on a per capita basis, of copyright laws in the world.

However, the problem doesn`t stem from p2p, p2p sites or the p2p networks. Rather, it`s directly attributable to the fact the entertainment cartels, with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in the lead, have flatly refused to accept that the Net has given the millions of people (who were hitherto cynically regarded as cash-cow `consumers`) freedom of choice.

This means they don`t have to put up with paying through the nose to watch 10 movies in the hope of finding one that`s worthwhile, buying discs with only one decent track, or paying a dollar and more for formulaic compressed low-fi mp3 downloads.

‘A new kind of appetite’
The cartels are stomping sites and suing customers as part of their `consumer education` marketing efforts.

But it isn`t working. Not even nearly.

Established entities who’ve grown used to seeing themselves as The Ones try to crush or belittle anything new which they see as a threat to the status quo.

They form public and secret alliances, superficially re-model their appearances to accord with the ‘new’ look without making any real changes, and refuse overtures by the developing entities to try to work together.

That’s the way it’s always been, and the situation existing between the entertainment industry and p2p technologies is no different.

But, “Internet has created a new kind of appetite,” the IHP has Big Champagne`s Eric Garland saying. “Tolerance for the artificial scarcity created by old licensing rules is quickly evaporating,” he says, going on:

“Hollywood needs to make sure they adapt quickly enough so that at least most of us have our first great experience watching a movie on the Internet through a service they themselves have come up with. If they wring their hands too much, they will be in a terrible, terrible position.”

Even Pontén, cannot help but agree, adds the report..

“I can say this: The work we do here is not very important as long as there is no legal alternative,” he said. “People want this service.”

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See:-
International Herald Tribune – In Sweden, paradise for the movie pirates, May 16, 2005
thoroughly disingenuous – Swedish anti-p2p site hacked: more, p2pnet, March 15, 2005

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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