IPRED interview

This week, on April 1st, the much debated IPRED law came into effect in Sweden. Because of my research on file sharing cultures, I was interviewed on Swedish TV4 [clip] about this law which allows copyright holders to force internet service providers to reveal details of users sharing files. One of the things I said was that I believe that the law will have some effect on the large group of casual file sharers, at least in the short run. Now, a few days later, that prediction has proved to be true. The Guardian writes:

“[The law] seems to have spooked some Swedes. By 2pm on Wednesday, internet traffic in Sweden had fallen by about 30% compared with the previous day. Statistics collected by Netnod, the Swedish clearing house for internet traffic, showed a dramatic drop in traffic. Compared with the previous level on Tuesday of about 120 gigabits of data passing over the network every second, on Wednesday it was down to 80Gbps.”

The fall in data may be due to people being worried that their ISP will track their data and that they may be sued for copyright infringement, which usually carries penalties equivalent to thousands of pounds.

My other main point was that, regardless of the obvious effect of these scare tactics on many users, file sharing will go on unimpaired in the long run. Historically, all attempts to stamp out or close down file sharing — such as the court sentence leading to the end of Napster in 2001 — have proven fruitless. This is of course due to the fact that the file sharing behaviors are not criminal acts in the traditional sense, and they are not just about individual platforms, services or technologies. They are also  youthful symbols of consumer empowerment reflecting a development towards new ways of accessing and using culture in creative ways. The case against Napster simply led to the emergence of a second generation of similar p2p-applications such as Kazaa and Gnutella. When attempts were made to control these, the major breakthrough for torrent technology took place. Now, as the IPRED law goes into effect, there is an explosion in strategies to make it ineffective. According to The Blog Pirate users are opening up their wlans in order for more people to be able to browse the net anonymously, and the Pirate Bay has already launched Ipredator, which is a so-called VPN service that allows users to be anonymous. Similiar services already exist, but the Pirate Bay say that no logs will be saved.