700,000 Swedes are file sharers
FIGURES show how much file sharers are a political force in Sweden, something that might worry the government and the movie and music makers.
Statistics Sweden said that more than 700,000 Swedes regularly used p2p file sharing programmes and 38 percent of young men were pirates.
This means for every ten Swedes there is one downloading illegally.
Women using peer-to-peer file sharing is less than half than that of men and it could not find a woman over 65 who used the software.
Sweden, is home of the Pirate Bay filesharing tracker, and has recently been trying to crack down on file sharing after the movie and music industry claimed it had become a centre for Internet piracy.
While the figures bare this idea out, they also tell politicians that there is enough of a political force to resist any changes.
A government, such as the current one, which is thinking about laws based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), might find themselves voted out. µ
L'INQ
AP
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While the figures bare this idea out
Swedish bare figures eh? Well I guess that explains the Freudian slip...
"Statistics Sweden said that more than 700,000 Swedes regularly used p2p file sharing programmes and 38 percent of young men were pirates. This means for every ten Swedes there is one downloading illegally."
No, it doesn't. It means that one in ten Swedes, and 38 in a hundred 16-24 year old Swedish men, are using file-sharing.
Please don't equate file-sharing with piracy: that's sloppy journalism at best, and plays into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA.
The original Sydney Morning Herald article refers to "38 percent of young men engaging in such OFTEN illegal Internet activities" (my emphasis) -- still biased, but at least not making unjustified assumptions and damning the innocent.
It is clear to me that you simply scraped the article, rather than going to the article's source to confirm the numbers it claims. Having looked at the Statistics Sweden site, in both English and Swedish, I haven't been able to find evidence of the claims you make in the article. Perhaps if you had done your own research, and confirmed the facts rather than parroting other journalists, you might have been able to provide a link to the survey in question.
Worse still, you totally fail to take into account (and perhaps even fail to comprehend) the difference between file-sharing, which can and does have perfectly legal and reasonable uses, and copyright theft.
I don't understand why this article was even passed for publication.
Having failed to put through the FRA law in Sweden the government are now s*%&ting their preverbials due to such statistics, not to mentioned the pressure being put on them from the MPAA, RIAA among just a few.
As mentioned in the previous post the powers that be seem unable to distingush between legal and illegal use of p2p and therefore we are all potential pirates.
That there are the EU elections soon. The Swedish Piratpartiet announced their list of candidates last week, and a major Swedish newspaper carried a comment by a political scientist and election researcher, calling the pirate party movement a 'civil rights movement'. I should also mention that they now have more members than the Green Party in Sweden.
The German Pirate Party is also running in an election next month, in the federal state of Hessen (which includes Frankfurt). The US Party is also starting a registration drive in California this week.
Andrew Norton
Pirate Party International
The reason why P2P is popular is:
1 simple program can get you all the music, tv, films, software, photos, books, just by using the search and download buttons.
There is no legal program as easy to use. Well Steam is quite easy, Steam just needs more content and to push itself.
The MPAA RIAA should get behind Steam, or similar. Push more content onto legal download tools.
Make it easy to use, and widely available at a low price. Launch all new blockbuster music/movies/software/books on this medium as well as the regular mediums, within 36 months there will be wide usage and you will achieve critical mass.
But if MPAA and RIAA did this then they would see their own revenues decrease. It is in their own self interest, and no one elses, to perpetuate this legal argument and DRM and hard to get expensive content.
** To The Inquirer: **
Please get someone like Charlie to start digging into MPAA RIAA. How much would moving content onto Steam/similar affect MPAA RIAA earnings?
Are MPAA RIAA looking after self interest instead of client's interest? Are MPAA RIAA breaking any laws by doing this?