Why the pirates are on the rise in Sweden
Found at the BBC
Newsnight’s Matt Prodger visits Sweden’s Peace and Love music festival in Borlange to investigate what it is about the Swedes that has put them at the heart of a raging debate about internet freedom.
For 24-hour party people a visit to the land of the midnight sun is a must. For one thing, the Swedes are serious when it comes to having fun – and at this time of year the sun never sets.
The Pirate Party doesn’t want to be perceived as a bunch of computer hackers that just want to download the latest
And so it is that I find myself at the Peace and Love festival in Borlänge long after bedtime, negotiating a sea of tents which stretches far into the blood-red glow of a night-long dusk .
I am here to try to find out what it is about Swedes that has put them at the heart of a raging debate about internet freedom.
It is estimated – but nobody really knows – that at least one in 10 Swedes swap music illegally via BitTorrent file-sharing websites like Sweden’s notorious Pirate Bay, and it is thought that in 2008, some 15m films were illegally downloaded here.
‘Sharing is caring’
Sitting in the shelter of a waist-high pile of beer crates I find my target demographic – a group of music-loving festival-goers.
Out of the five of them, three voted for the Pirate Party in this year’s European elections, helping to put a representative, Christian Engström, into the European Parliament
Twenty-year-old Erik Lennermo explains why he voted for the Pirate Party.
“Civil rights. Everybody has a right of privacy for their own e-mails, SMS messages and phone calls. File-sharing is just a small bit of the whole cake.”
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