The Hypocrisy Weblog

According to a report quoted on the swedish IT-news site IDG.se, 80% of the network-traffic in Sweden is piracy-related. With piracy I mean Applications, Games and Movies.

On the site where this news is posted, which you can find below for sources, the ones claiming this is the Anti-Piracy organization “Antipiratbyrån” – the Anti-Piracy Bureau. The bureau is an organzation put together by the software, game and movie industry, and is there to (obviously) defeat piracy, which in the end makes them lose huge amounts of money.

I do believe that the Anti-Piracy Bureau is right in their reasoning. In the news-article you can read that the bureau claims that 15 million movies are downloaded each year in Sweden (a figure coming from Mediavision), and according to my own experiences; most people I know don’t buy DVDs etc now, they simply go online to download the ~4GB (GigaByte) that the regular DVD-disc consist of and burn their own DVD-copies.

Is this wrong? You bet it is, but then again – why should the people who buy a DVD-burner for around 70€+shipping bother renting a movie for ~5Euros/24hours when you can often get it faster from the net compared to what it takes to go to the DVD-rentalstore and back again? (with the increasing number of users with fast Internet-connections, this is a reality now.)I am not saying that what I just wrote is “ok”, but it’s understandable. (If you understand swedish and read the reader-comments of the news-article, you’ll see that many writes that it’s “propaganda” from the Anti-piracy Bureau, which totally shows a general attitude of the swedish (in this case) people, as I see it.)

Is there any hope for the industry? Yes, I do believe that the Netflix-clones and the Movie / applications / games on demand may serve the industry good in the long run, but I think that there needs to be a change in people’s attitudes. Now it is considered “ok” to not pay for someone elses work, musicians are considered to work for free etc.

To end this post; I’ve read an interesting article in a Swedish Internet Magazine, where 2 representatives from the music-industry respectively a piracy organization sits down for a discussion. A lot of what the piracy organization’s rep. claims is just horrific and narrowminded in my mind, but then again – I can understand the “rebellion”. I hope to get the time in order to dissect this article and comment on selected parts of it. It could end up with something quite interesting, I think.

The article from IDG.se
The Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau

(The logo on the top of the post belongs to Svenska Antipiratbyrån.)

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