Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm has been deported from Cambodia to Sweden to serve a one year jail sentence for breach of copyright. On arrival he was charged with a further offence; I have received several messages that this new charge relates to his work in hosting Wikileaks, but I have no confirmation at the moment and Svartholm is being held incommunicado. Can anyone confirm or contradict this?
Svartholm had been assured by Swedish authorities that, if he returned back to serve his jail sentence, he would not face further charges; that was broken the moment he arrived back in Sweden. That may well be a pointer for how seriously we can take assurances that the patently false “sexual assault” charges fabricated against Julian Assange are the real motive for the Swedish authorities’ pursuit of him.
EU Commission sources tell me that Sweden paid Cambodia around 50 million euros for Svartholm’s deportation to Sweden (there is no extradition agreement). The money is in government to government aid and targeted on development of democratic institutions and global warming. The Cambodian government is scarcely a democracy, and the idea that the money will, once paid over, in fact be usefully spent in those areas is extremely fanciful. From my own very substantial experience of development aid, 50 million Euros is a very large sum to dedicate to those areas in terms of the overall Swedish development aid budget, and absolutely unprecedented between Sweden and Cambodia. My EU Commission source is adamant that this “aid” payment and Svartholm’s extradition were agreed at the same meeting between Swedish and Cambodian officials a week ago.
The Svartholm case and the dodgy “aid” payment has been very little covered by the mainstream media, because it reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the Swedish authorities are prepared to go, to please the US in bringing down those involved with Wikileaks, and to dissociate themeselves from Sweden’s brief period as the home of internet freedom.
It’s all generational.
The war generation looked down upon the 60s generation. The 60s generation looked down upon the 90s generation. And there’s all sorts of problems for the inbetweeners.
It’s important to remember here that the 90s generation was a heap of consumer pooh pooh.
They were even called “yoof”. They were so absent they had to be created.
They’re the generation that never thought to protest anything other than were they getting bad orgasms.
The present generation of young people seem more like they’re a bit pissed off with important stuff.
That’s why it’s important we support these young people against that horrible spirit-free 90s generation that is trying to destroy them.
Well put Brendan.
Welcome back Komodo.
My video about Anna Ardin and Irmeli Krans discussing the condom affair is getting favourable comments (in Australia at least) where I am informed it is popping up everywhere, but I suspect mostly on sites visited by people with a certain political viewpoint. I think the satire works, and I got a good deal of inspiration from the post and comments on this blog: “Why I think Anna Ardin is a Liar”. So thanks to one and all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nIrLS3gI8A&feature=context-gau
Passerby to TonyF12,
Just how much do these said “artists want to get paid?” and how many times do they intend to get paid for the same work over and over again?
Sorry, mate. You are talking garbage. Payments to musicians and composers are not only about funding greedy fatcats. I have been in the music business all my working life and most of us earn remarkably normal to low incomes. If our work is robbed by outfits like Pirate Bay then we cannot pay our rent, mortgages or supermarket bills. This is not a freedom issue and Pirate Bay deserves minimal support in the context of much greater insults to society. They help themselves to others’ work without consideration and I hope they go out of business.
I accept Craig’s point that Pirate Bay’s motivation may not be personal greed of the instigators. However taking the concept to a further extreme would justify encouraging thieving from supermarkets to feed and clothe the poor. The Establishment would not take kindly to that either, nor would the owners and staff of the supermarkets if it put them out of business.
TonyF12, thanks for your comments.
A statement of interest first: I’m a big fan of music, and my journey in discovering new music goes like this. I start off with the radio (nearly always BBC R6) and legal streaming services. I then download, either from file storage sites or Torrenting to try the whole album, and finally I buy CDs from the web. I’m buying more music than I ever have before – partly a bit more disposable income, but mainly increased exposure to great music. I guess you might call this the “honesty box” approach.
I agree entirely that the music industry isn’t rewarding most artists equitably. A few artists at the top get obscene salaries for work that is generally, in whatever genre, designed to “shift units” to undemanding customers, whilst the grafters who are arguably more talented are scrimping to make ends meet. So it’s not fair, and – though I’m buying the real thing to support artists – I also believe in doing so, I am encouraging more poor behaviour from the industry.
The legal streaming services are fine for trying music, but do check the remuneration that artists get per play – they are terrible. Spotify, a very popular service here in the UK, is one of the worst. Also, I am not comfortable renting my music – why would I permit a situation in which MegaCorp Inc can cut me off from material I’ve paid for? I’m the same on copy-protected digital downloads: Microsoft’s disastrous exit from the sector left a lot of customers with files they couldn’t play on new devices.
I do wonder however if this is getting better – the DRM experiment has failed, and people can now buy quite a lot of music that is unencrypted. But the bitrates are still questionable – I won’t listen to anything under 320Kbs, but some stores are still doing 192! Weirdly, buying the CD at a cut-price web store is often cheaper than the digital version (5GBP rather than 6-7GBP).
I would question your analogy about stealing from a supermarket – that is a very different issue. Copying music does not deprive the owner of the CD of their copy, but stealing a loaf of bread does in fact deprive the store of a saleable product. Thus, the economics are very different – and some have suggested that illegal copying acts as a persuasive form of word-of-mouth advertising, and contributes to artists’ exposure and popularity.
What is the solution? I am not happy with people stealing creative material without paying for it, but reducing internet freedoms is an even higher social cost. This is a classic Free Rider Problem – so long as the creative industries remain viable, and the level of free-riding is relatively low, tolerating some illegal copying may actually be the best solution. I am certainly not of the view that the industry (as it stands) would be suddenly keen to write decent contracts and pay small artists equitably if piracy were to disappear overnight!
It might be that artists have to shift more emphasis onto live music – an exhilarating and totally unstealable experience – and that would be a great development. And of course the internet creates a space where smaller and unsigned artists can get heard.
Erik made this point
Ok, I made my point. But for deaf ears it seems. More fun with conspiracy than logic I guess?
I still don’t understand why everyone here seems to think that the authorities would prefer to resort to dodgy deals (just for the fun of it then, or why?) when legal means and correct procedure are more than sufficient to bring Svartholm home.
Revoked passport + expired visa = easy transport to Sweden. No money needed.
But each to their own I guess. Enjoy your world. Don’t forget your tin foil hats…
From the Prosecutors’ website
Man arrested on suspicion of hacking
2012-09-11
The preliminary investigation concerning hacking against the company Logica has sprung interest made against a person previously convicted in Sweden for copyright infringement.
August 30th man arrested in Cambodia and subsequently sent to Sweden. Swedish prosecutors arrested the man this morning on suspicion of hacking. The time to ask him in custody expires on Friday, September 14 at 12 noon.
The man has for some time been internationally wanted for the execution of prison sentence after the Pirate Bay trial. It was a result of you called for his arrest in Cambodia.
Prosecutor Henry Olin of the International Public Prosecution Office Stockholm can not say more about the investigation at the moment but will be back with more information as soon as possible.
http://www.aklagare.se/Media/Nyheter/Man-anhallen-misstankt-for-dataintrang/
Logica (formerly WM-data) has Skatteverket (Internal Revenue Service) as a customer. Svartholm is suspected of illegally obtaining classified information on Swedish Citizens.
Sweden does not have an extradition treaty with Cambodia. There was no extradition hearing. He was illegally in Cambodia, expired visa.
A Interpol Red Notice have been issued.
Revoked passport + expired visa = easy deportation
Now you can go into space with fanciful conspiracy theories. Don’t forget to put on your tin-foil hats.
Clark 12 Sep, 2012 – 3:06 pm.
Has Craig ever made that book public in some way. Torrent perhaps?
Thanks Jon,
How the recorded music embraces new technology like electronic delivery is a riddle which possibly has no solution at the stage we are now. One thing is for sure, the industry has a lot for which it alone deserves a high proportion of the blame. Had we embraced the concept earlier on instead of taking moral supposedly high ground and sending in Shock + Awe armies of lawyers, then we would be in a better place now.
The royalties from Spotify are not great, but there is a “BUY NOW” button which enables sales of the full product rather than the streaming. Royalties from iTunes and increasingly from YouTube are worth having. CDs still sell in quite a few markets and do well for concert artists and for the gift market to over 35’s.
The vacuum created by our industry’s initial knee-jerk response to reject electronic delivery enabled all sorts of low life to make money out of illegal downloads. Maybe Pirate Bay is or was operated by ‘nice’ people, but I still maintain that their intention was always to ride roughshod over musicians and composers by cutting off their supply of money to pay their mortgages. Business models for musicians have changed for sure, but so long as Pirate Bay and their ilk offer distribution of our material without payment we are being cut off at the knees.
My company has been in the recording business for decades and I have participated in various committees, thinktanks and workshops about electronic distribution. We are launching a label in the New Year and I am very ready to make it all work for us and for our musicians + composers, but the spectre of Pirate Bay enterprises slitting our throats is daunting. That freedom-fighter contributors on Craig’s blog think the Pirate Bay cause is just are simply missing a very important point – Pirate Bay breaks the law in a big way.
There is an excellent article, regarding this curious affair, at the AsiaTimesOnLine website
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NI14Ae01.html
Michael Stephenson, 13 Sep, 7:07 pm: I was referring to Murder in Samarkand, which Craig has not released as a gratis download. However, the only copy I have read was from a public library.
Another of Craig’s books, The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, is available without charge; in fact I host a copy on my web space:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/craig.html
Publishing businesses dropped publication of this book due to libel threats. Craig considered it more important that the story be published than that he get his miserable few pence per sale, so he asked readers of this blog to publish it on the ‘net.
TonyF12, this is a complex issue. The Pirate Bay and other such sites do indeed perform useful functions, such as hosting material that the corporate system would keep from us. They also serve as a “Try Before You Buy” service; research has indicated that overall, this increases rather than decreases legally sanctioned distribution (ie “sales”). You might find this discussion interesting:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/09/hating-the-internet/
TonyF12, here’s some maths by Courtney Love:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
And here are some suggestions as to the way forward by Richard Stallman:
http://www.stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html
Jon, as mentioned in RMS’s article above, “piracy” is a propaganda term, and I urge you to reject it. File sharing is totally dissimilar from violently invading ships at sea, killing the occupants and stealing everything.
@Clark, yes: “try before you buy” is my “honesty box” approach.
“Piracy”, fair enough – I will try to avoid it. But the name of the website under discussion doesn’t much help 😉
@TonyF12, on iTunes royalties being “worth having”. Yes, in the short term – it’s valuable income after all. But Apple are another corporation who care much more about their share of the global music pie than the tiny producers making music. We need a global platform in which the true creatives (players, producers, mixers, graphic designers etc) get paid directly, though a large number of conduit platforms, who in turn take a small cut proportional to the amount of work they’ve actually put in.
(I tried to find out what Apple’s percentage is on music – do you know? It’s 30% on the app store, but couldn’t find a source for their cut on other kinds of creative works.)
Jon: “But the name of the website under discussion doesn’t much help :)”
It’s self-parody, like LulzSec’s ASCII-art pirate boat. ASCII-art is not remotely seaworthy, and its offensive capabilities are nil.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110623091415/http://lulzsecurity.com/
TonyF12:
I missed that point before, and in most cases I think that assertion about motive is untrue. Some unauthorised live streaming TV services allegedly made money from advertising, but I’d not be of the view that the first wave of P2P services were making money – they were free software which didn’t require the visiting of any website to find and download music (Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, etc).
Torrent sites these days carry some advertising, but often the meagre funds online ads generates goes straight into expensive dedicated server budgets. For people who are doing it for the love of sharing, I don’t think there is much money to be made. Rather (and especially in the case of Pirate Bay) it is a statement of anarchistic, anti-corporate control, and probably a bit of a sod-you to the powers of monopolist, capitalist authoritarianism. The motto was “information wants to be free”.
There have been some instances of money making from file sharing – Megaupload comes to mind, now shut down. But that was nothing to do with anarchistic ideology, and allegedly there were other crimes involved (fraud I believe). Accordingly I think it would be unfair to conflate the two – they’re quite different.
For me, the key thing to keep in mind in both the extradition of Svartholm and Assange is the fact that George W Bush’s and Romney’s electoral strategist Karl Rove (no less) is an adviser to the Swedish government on the Assange case.
http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/index.php?topic=14060.0
The Swedish government is pro-US and always has been extremely Russophobic. For those of us who recall the image of Sweden being neutral during WW2 and quite liberal in the post war period, it should be recalled that in earlier times in history, Sweden had its own predatory Empire. Between 1560-1815, the Swedish Empire ruled over Finland, the part of Russia where modern St Petersburg is now located, Estonia and parts of present day Latvia including the capital Riga. It also ruled over colonies on the northern coast of present day Poland and Germany. See this map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Swedish_Empire_in_Early_Modern_Europe_%281560-1815%29.png
The Swedish Empire regarded the Baltic Sea as its largest lake (Sweden itself being one enormous lake district).
In the Great Northern War, 1700–21, Denmark–Norway, Saxony, Poland-Lithuania and Russia declared war on the Swedish Empire. The war ended with a defeat for Sweden. Russia’s Peter I consolidated the victory by building the city of St Petersburg in 1703. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_War
This history of inter-imperialist rivalry between Sweden and Russia in the Baltic region explains to a degree the reason why modern day Sweden is so pro-US and Russophobic. To this very day there is no ferry line from Stockholm to St Petersburg.
So, basically, are we saying that Sweden bribed Cambodia to deport a alleged Wikileaks associate? From his original post, it would seem that Craig source(s) suggest(s) this. Goran’s interjection here is interesting. Why the aspersions and references to “tinfoil hats”? Are we not simply in pursuit of the truth? It would be really useful to have someone else with the requisite knowledge who is Swedish – in Sweden – offer an opinion on these boards on this specific matter.