Letter to the EU Commission

A call to decriminalize file sharing is probably not what the European Commission wanted when they requested comments on a communication on file sharing and copyright. But this is what I sent them:

As a member of the Swedish Parliament and as a Swedish citizen subjected to European-Union regulation I appreciate the opportunity to give my view on the issues of file sharing and copyright law.

The annex of the communication on creative content online in the Single Market consists of 11 questions. What follows here is my answer to questions 9, 10 and 11 regarding stakeholder cooperation and filtering.

The French Model Should not be Exported

The core of the French model for combating copyright violations, as described in the Commission’s communication, is to identify file sharers and to cut their internet access. The ISP:s then have a responsibility for the content that their subscribers download, and to enforce copyright violations some surveillance will be necessary.

In Sweden, a similar proposal has been put forward as a part of “the Renfors report.” When the Swedish government sent the Renfors proposal out to agencies and organizations for consideration the criticism was harsh. The Swedish Courts of Appeal questions whether banning citizens from the Internet would indeed reduce online file sharing. Despite several other countries having already taken similar action, none have had good results to show for it. In Finland, that has implemented this model, files-sharing activity initially dropped. However, after only three months the illegal file-sharing activities were back at previous levels.

The Swedish Data Inspection Board, responsible for safeguarding the individual’s integrity, asks whether the Renfors proposal is consistent with the protection of private correspondence that is granted by the European Convention on Human Rights. EU directives as well as national legislation say that the responsibility of the Internet Service Providers is to offer a tool for communication – not to keep track of what individuals discuss or what information they exchange. The Competition Authority adds that it’s unreasonable to give private businesses responsibilities that should belong to a government agency.

Copyright Enforcement Threatens Integrity

Sweden is one of the world’s most prominent technology nations, and our technology friendliness is reflected in the public opinion that views file sharing primarily as a positive phenomenon. A big part of the Swedish population favors decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing. With our technological development, this is the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.

Already there are anonymization services on the market that make the currently discussed models ineffective. Putting an end to copyright-infringing file sharing will demand other tools that further intensifies the surveillance of the Internet. The simple truth is that almost all communication channels on the Internet can be used to distribute copyrighted information. If you can use a service to send a message you can most likely use the same service to send an mp3-song. Those who want to prevent people from exchanging of copyrighted material must filter all electronic communication between citizens. This would be an unacceptable violation of citizens’ right to privacy.

The media industry needs reasonable rules to play by. The right to reasonable rules should apply also to Internet Service Providers, who don’t want to be an online police force. Making broadband suppliers watch what their customers download on the Internet would be like making postal services open every package. Those who defend creators’ rights should also defend everyone’s right to communicate without surveillance.

Reform Protectionist Copyright Laws

There will always be industries that call for harsher legislation when the market changes. Their interest in stopping progress must be weighed against the public’s interest in taking advantage of the opportunities that technology gives them. If politicians had met the demands from the copyright industry throughout history we would have had a considerably poorer media landscape; without music radio, VCR:s, mp3 players. All these innovations have met political and legal resistance.

CDs and DVDs that you buy in a store or order by mail will be phased out by modern file-sharing technologies. If this means the end of the recording industry as we know it, this is nothing that we can or should prevent. Attempting to stop file sharing to save the recording industry would be like outlawing cars to increase the sales of horse carriages.

While entertainment producers with old business models struggle, new businesses rise as a result of the technological shift. Youtube and Yahoo Launchcast are only two out of innumerous examples of how the Internet can bring both value to consumers and revenue to producers. In fact, we should demand that everyone seeking to make a profit from selling entertainment adapts to this new reality. That means they need to have business models that are consistent with the freedom to share material on the Internet. Copyright laws, as they are designed in most western countries, set out to protect entertainment producers by granting them a monopoly on copying and distributing their goods. Generally, we demand that entrepreneurs have business models that work without legislated monopolies. Why should this not apply to creative artists?

Copyright should not be considered a property right. In “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism”, the economist and Nobel-Prize recipient FA Hayek explains the difference between conventional property rights and copyright. While the supply of material resources is limited by nature the supply of an immaterial good unlimited, unless the government limits the supply by law. According to Hayek, there is no empirical evidence that copyright laws stimulate innovation. A later Nobel-Prize recipient, Milton Friedman, describes copyright as a monopoly that decreases supply to a lever below the optimal level. Copyright and the regulations that follow from it should, according to Friedman, be described primarily as a limitation of free speech.

There is obviously no clear-cut, time-resistant frame defining what the government should protect as property. Neither is there empirical evidence that copyright laws need to be preserved in their current form. Therefore, I strongly react against the suggested efforts to raise “awareness on the importance of copyright for the availability of content.” Such effort could not be described as education, if education is defined as spreading information based on science.

Karl Sigfrid
Member of the Swedish Parliament representing the Moderate party

Interview by Washington Internet Daily

I recently wrote about the Swedish Performing Rights Society’s proposal to introduce a broadband fee for file sharers. Washington Internet Daily interviewed me on the subject:

Rights Group Plan Would Allow File-Sharers to Pay ISPs More for Legal Downloads

A Swedish rights body is mulling legal file-swapping if ISP subscribers pay more. The plan, first reported by the English-language paper The Local, would license file-sharing and was unveiled Friday, a Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM) spokeswoman confirmed, providing no more details by our deadline.

Moderate Party legislator Karl Sigfrid, who favors decriminalizing file-sharing, said a modest fee would be more palatable to ISPs and users than tougher enforcement of intellectual property rights, but STIM’s plan won’t work until the international copyright regime is changed.

STIM wants to talk to ISPs about enabling customers to pay for music streaming over networks, The Local quoted the group as saying. The regime would raise an average user’s monthly Internet charge in proportion to the total amount of music downloaded, allowing users to access and download all tracks available online at a given time. The system would entail licensing agreements between STIM and other rights owners.

STIM reportedly noted several technical, financial and legal barriers, such as negative effects on existing legal music services. But Sigfrid said the proposal raises other issues as well.

Sigfrid’s chief criticism is that “Sweden can’t solve the file-sharing/copyright conflict in a way that’s radically different” from how it’s done elsewhere. To decriminalize file-swapping, with or without the Internet fee STIM suggests, Sweden must work within the EU, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and other international bodies, he said. But nationally, Sweden can resist setting harsher penalties on file-sharers, Sigfrid said. Uploading and downloading copyrighted content is illegal, but that need not be countered with means many people find overly invasive, he said.

And collecting and distributing user fees could lead to arbitrary distribution of the money, Sigfrid said. Someone collecting money for copyright owners will put it to other uses, he said. If charges are mandatory, non-downloaders would be paying for others’ music. If voluntary, who would pay the fee, he asked.

If international terms can be reached, a monthly fee for downloads would be preferable to more enforcement, said Sigfrid, adding that STIM’s proposal can’t work unless the international copyright regime changes. “Still, the change has to start somewhere, so I think the STIM proposal is a good initiative to start an international debate,” he said. Sweden’s national recording industry association didn’t respond to a request for comment. — Dugie Standeford

Reproduced by permission of Warren Communications News, Inc., 800-771-9202, [ http://mail.warren-news.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.warren/ ]www.warren-news.com

Los Angeles Times: Stealing or Sharing?

On the Los Angeles Times editorial page, Jon Healey brings up my views on immaterial property, or immaterial monopolies as I prefer to call them.

In essence, Sigfrid is saying that something in unlimited supply can’t be stolen. His position is a variation on a theme advanced by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com, among others: that the entertainment industry’s aggressive copyright-enforcement efforts spring from an outdated, analog-era notion of scarcity. Under this view, copyright holders are helped, not harmed, by file sharing and other online distribution pipelines; they just haven’t adapted their business models to take advantage of the new opportunities. Supporters of this view include musicians, authors and filmmakers who say that that file sharing helped bring the exposure they needed to sell their works.

[...]

As Sigfrid noted, there’s a fundamental difference between intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and real property (houses, cars, plasma TVs): The latter is tangible and limited in supply, the former is not. “Copyright infringement is not ‘theft’ in the same way that taking a CD from a store is theft,” said Mark Lemley, a copyright expert at Stanford University Law School. “If I take your physical property, I have it and you no longer do. If I copy your song, I have it, but so do you.”

Read the complete article

Swedish Broadband-Fee Proposal

STIM, the Swedish Performing Rights Society, recently proposed a broadband fee to compensate copyright holders for P2P downloading.

I don’t believe in this idea. Collecting user fees and distributing them could lead to arbitrary distribution of the money. The Swedish library fee is an example of this. For each book lent out, a fee is paid. However only 60 percent of the fee goes to the writer and the rest stays in the so called Swedish Author’s Fund which uses the money for stipends, etc. As soon as you have a middleman collecting money, this middleman will take money intended for the copyright holder and use it for other purposes.

Other weakness of the proposal is that if the system is mandatory, people who don’t download would have to pay for other people’s downloading. If the system is voluntary, it’s unclear what incentives anyone would have to pay the fee.

Then of course, there’s the complication with international agreements.

With that said, if an international agreement could be reached, a monthly fee for downloading would still be better than harsher laws. However, I prefer to have neither.

Ubuntu and Open-Source at Government Agencies

A few days ago, I installed Ubuntu on my computer. Unlike other Linux distributions that I’ve tried, it works excellent despite the fact that I have no Linux experience. The hardware is automatically identified and most applications can be installed using a simple GUI. The only thing that took a while was to install NVIDIA:s graphics drivers.

Free open-source software is becoming an ever more important part of our economy. Business models that aren’t based on selling copies of an immaterial good – and controlling that no one else distributes copies – are especially interesting when we know that controlling the distribution cannot be combined with the citizens’ right to privacy.

The government should, whenever possible, avoid proprietary software that makes us dependent on closed formats, thereby stifling competition. Therefore, I have addressed the following question to our IT Minister Åsa Torstensson:

The Dutch government has started a project to lower their software-license costs by using open-source software and open standards. By enabling agencies to choose between several vendors, the cost for software and services can be pressed down. According to Techworld Open Source(in Swedish), the Dutch government expects to save $7 million only from using open-source software to administer their real-estate register.

Agencies and other government organizations use lots of different software to perform their tasks, store information and communicate with citizens. When proprietary software is used, there is a risk of getting locked into formats that will be expensive to replace in the future. It’s also unacceptable to demand that citizens buy certain commercial software to access public information. This could be the case when using proprietary document formats or when offering web applications that require Internet Explorer, excluding those who use other web browsers or operating systems for which Internet Explorer is not available. The government rewards individual companies when using too much proprietary software at the expense of competitors and tax payers.

Taking this into account, which initiatives will the Minister take to explore how open-source software and open standards can save tax-payer money and benefit agencies and individuals?