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Copyright Directive EUCD, and the 2004 Intellectual
Property Rights Enforcement Directive IPRED. We have also seen a
number of information campaigns, often saying that “file sharing is theft”.
     
    With so much experience from a number of countries, the rights holder’s
organizations are of course in a very good position to judge how effective the
strategy has been.
     
    ”Could you tell us about these experiences,
and could you give any examples where illegal file sharing in a country had
been eliminated or greatly reduced by information campaigns and sanctions?” I asked the representatives from IFPI and the MPA.
     
    The representative from IFPI said that so far, the strategy had not been
very successful. This was because the rights holders are forced to go through
the courts to punish illegal file sharers, which severely restricts the number
of cases they are able to pursue.
     
    IFPI and the other rights holders would need to make a more wide-scale
mass response in order to create an effective deterrent, she said. She was
hoping that the EU would come to the rescue with legislation to allow this.
     
    When it came to giving an example of a country where stricter
enforcement had led to significantly reduced file sharing, she mentioned
Sweden, where the IPRED directive was implemented on April 1, 2009.
     
    So let’s look at the graph for the total Internet traffic in Sweden
around that time:
     

     
    It is indeed true that there was a sharp drop in the total network
traffic, by about 40 per cent, on the day the Ipred law came into force in
Sweden. IFPI and the other anti-piracy organizations immediately sent out
jubilant press releases saying that the Ipred law really worked. This has been
the line that they have maintained ever since.
     
    But when we look at the graph, we see that six months later, the network
traffic was back to where it used to be. If this was a success for the
sanctions strategy against file sharing, it was a very short-lived one.
     
    And this is how it has been all over the world. Just like IFPI told the
working group in the European Parliament, information to Internet users and
stricter sanctions have so far been unable to stem the tide of illegal file
sharing. But they still hope that more of the same will be effective.
     
    There is nothing to suggest that their hopes have any base in reality.
The “information and enforcement” strategy simply isn’t working, no matter how
much they or anybody else would want it to.
     
    The copyright industry just wants more, more, and more, and it doesn’t
think twice about ruining our hard-won fundamental civil liberties to prop up
their crumbling monopoly and control. When one tough measure doesn’t work
— and they never do — the copyright industry keeps demanding more.
     
    A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking
on the wheel. It is a term most people are not very familiar with these days,
but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first
had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a
wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually
thirst, a couple of days later.
     
    The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in
18th century France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular
than others, and to get some additional revenue to the Crown’s tax coffers, the
King sold a monopoly on these patterns to selected members of the nobility, who
in turn could charge an arm and a leg for them (and did so).
     
    But the peasants and commoners could produce these patterns themselves.
They could produce pirated copies of the fabrics, outside of the nobility’s
monopoly. So the nobility went to the King and demanded that the monopoly they
had bought with good money should be upheld by the King’s force.
     
    The King responded by introducing penalties for pirating these fabrics.
Light punishments at