Battleangel

I was planning to say a few words about this … before the news gets really old …

The U.S. film industry on Friday hailed a raid by Swedish police against an Internet service provider as a major blow to European piracy of movies and music on the Web.

The raid was carried out on Thursday at the Stockholm offices of Bahnhof, Sweden’s oldest and largest ISP, which U.S. copyright protection experts have considered a haven for high-level Internet piracy for years.

“This was a very big raid,” said John Malcolm, worldwide anti-piracy operations director at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents Hollywood’s major studios.

“The material that was seized contained not only evidence of a piracy organization operating in Sweden but of online piracy organizations operating throughout all of Europe,” he told Reuters.

Bahnhof, the first major ISP raided by the Swedes without advance notice, was home to some of the biggest and fastest servers in Europe, the MPAA said in a statement.

The servers seized during the operation contained a total of 1,800 digital movie files, 5,000 software application files and 450,000 digital audio files — amounting to 23 terabytes of data.

Source: Reuters

For those non-Swedish speakers out there this may be the only news of this that you will get. I.e. the industry propaganda. I have taken the liberty of marking (in red) outright lies, illogical statements and conjecture in the above statement which Reuters probably got from the MPAA without questioning the authenticity.

Firstly, it’s difficult not to comment on the Americocentrism in the article. As if the MPAA was directly to thank for the swiftness of the operation. Not to say that the nefarious influence, and American influence in general, isn’t a scourge and that it is American ideals that drive this frenzy. I wonder if they will be so quick to assume responsibility when they learn of its failure and the complete outrage, boycotting and resistance it has caused.
They are however correct on one account. This is a first for Sweden. The repercussions are difficult to guess. And as such we have the initiative and we will prove to the world that we do not approve of this scandalous behavior. To have American lackeys operating within our system, whispering lies and temptations in the ear of our officials. We will resist. And all you who aid this treachery shall be made pariahs, dishonored and spat upon.

In another sentence, there is a definitive dark undertone to his way to describe “piracy” in Europe. “Not only” is obviously a connotation meant to reinforce an argument, something one usually doesn’t need to do unless the the argument is lame. The use of “organization” twice is supposed to portray an ideological and legitimate adversary as something big and threatening. “Operating” falls under the same type of power language obviously. “Throughout all” is purposely using two similar words to reiterate how bad the situation is, as if one wasn’t enough to get the point through. And the use of “piracy”, well don’t get me started on that.
This falls right within the bounds of a long running anti-Europeanism in the US. And serves to paint a picture where Europe seems like a crime ridden continent, that threatens the very ideals of the American system.

Other factual errors:

• The Swedish Police did not directly oversee the raid. But yes, it sounds more official and more criminal by claiming that.
• There was no evidence found and even the antipiracy organization has admitted to that. Now the real police has taken over and perhaps they can spend weeks going over the data in order to “find” something illegal. But as for “1,800 digital movie files, 5,000 software application files and 450,000 digital audio files”, forget about it. But again, those are nice and round figures. And no one bothered to ask for a source.

What will happen next? Well to begin with, there will be the compulsory boycott against those that support Swedish antipiracy. And while boycotts usually don’t hit that hard, they can’t be good for public relations either.
Also, complaints have been launched with the appropriate authorities and it is likely that antipiracy will be caught up in a legal web of its own shortly. In the meantime, it’s business as usual. The important thing is not to succumb to the fear mongering and propaganda. And to remember that this is just a piece of a much larger puzzle of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. By our action we become no less than freedom fighters.

See also: The Local Swedish anti-piracy web site hacked after ISP raid “The fight between “anti-piracy” organisations and those who advocate free sharing of music and film files comes to Sweden, and it’s getting dirty, with paid informers, dawn raids, hacked web sites and death threats.”