Battleangel

And Sweden has the questionable honor of being smack at the center of attention.

Reuters via CNet - The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said it was launching 2,100 legal cases and extending the action to five new countries in Europe, Asia and, for the first time, South America.

It said file-sharers in Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Hong Kong and Singapore faced prosecution for the first time.

In Sweden, IFPI said, the music industry was announcing 15 criminal complaints against music uploaders, with more complaints to follow. It said research showed that more than 1 million people in the Nordic country are file sharing illegally.

At least it’s heartwarming that Swedes are taking a stance and doing something worth taking notice of. Apparently we’re whizzes at file sharing and shafting the corporate fascist media industry. Now, if only that could extend to our international commitment.

On a technical note, the at least the Swedish law suits (that most likely will go nowhere) are based on data collected via Direct Connect and Kazaa. I.e. networks where massive amounts of data can be shared and checked at once. I saw a number in the vicinity of 150,000 songs or so. Which would mean 10,000 songs per user roughly. Not that unlikely, I used to have a fairly balanced share when I was still stuck on DC (before BT) and I probably shared 12,000 songs or so as a high water mark before an archiving cycle. And that was 2-3 years ago. As such I have to question the claim by IFPI that these are the biggest fish in the Swedish p2p sea. This seems far too arbitrary.
The central concept in these flimsy attempts is certainly quantity. Sharing a single album (or technically bits and pieces of it) on a BitTorrent tracker is not very impressive and as such the risk remains low.

The article claims that this is part of a “carrot-and-stick approach” when it is really all stick and a slew of dull, useless and expensive online music shops. John Kennedy seems to be blissfully uninformed as well, especially given his halfwitted dinosaur metaphor. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who the real dinosaurs are and that they are about to walk into the biggest pit of marketing tar of a generation.