Stand up for your rights
Well, well, well…. If you haven’t heard, there was a raid on a Swedish ISP a few days ago; read an English article about it here: http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/13/news/international/piracy.reut/index.htm
In short, the Swedish Antipiracy Agency (not as much an agency as a bunch of lawyers hired by the movie industry to seek out and terrorize everyone dealing in P2P and illegal downloads) had reason to believe that certain copyright violations had been made on a server that probably was located in the ISP’s server-room. They had a list of 4 movies and 8 songs that they were looking for; but instead of asking the ISP to tell the offenders to remove the violating files, they barged in on them unannounced.
And they didn’t find what they were looking for (“the server in question must be in another one of their locations”, a representative for the Antipiracy Agency reportedly said) – but that didn’t stop them from snooping around more in the ISP’s office and seizing four OTHER servers which they happened to find copywrited material on. This is an outraging breach of privacy and also a total misinterpretation and bending of the law. This has resulted in an uproar among not only Swedish “pirates” or P2P-users but also regular folks.
There is much talk in Swedish media today about the “Gestapo” methods of the agency in question; and how they have used all but illegal methods to extract information about file sharers and file servers. Some hackers hacked their site and exposed the rat behind the recent raid:
www.antipiratbyran.com
Mirror of the hack here
Some more articles: (All in Swedish!)
www.idg.se
www.piratbyran.org
www.piratbyran.org
Oh, and just so that I don’t appear TOO biased, some articles from the major Swedish newspapers: