With how liberal a place Sweden is I am surprised that this is happening there but on April 1st Sweden put into effect as part of the Swedish Antipiracy Agency’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive or IPRED. This law orders internet service providers to give up the IP address of those that are illegally sharing files. Three Swedish ISP’s have stated that they will just start immediately erasing the IP address of those that use their site, which they are lawfully supposed to be doing any way to protect privacy according to a pre-existing law.
Visitor traffic is essential for a ISP to stay online but since the passing of this law Sweden has seen a drastic drop in internet use by 30-50% and has stayed low ever since.
In file sharer’s defense there was also a recent study by BI Norwegian School of Management which studied the downloading habits of 2000 young adults and found that those who illegally download music via a P2P network are 10x likely to purchase music legally then those who don’t download music illegally. The study also found that those between the ages of 15-20 were more likely to purchase music through a pay download service but had still purchased at least one CD within the last 6 months. These findings also agree with a similar study done by the Canadian division of the RIAA in 2006. 73% of people surveyed in that study said that they purchased the music after they illegally downloaded it.
Record label EMI doesn’t quite buy into BI’s stats, though. EMI’s Bjørn Rogstad told Aftenposten that the results make it seem like free downloads stimulate pay downloads, but there’s no way to know for sure. “There is one thing we are not going away, and it is the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines. It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music,” Rogstad said.
Some are speculating that the rise of illegal downloading and the fall of CD sales will cause the rise of the vinyl industry once again, which has been on the rise as of late. The reason being that the physical music format will return to a novelty. Spending $18 on a CD and then turning around to buy the record is financially unsustainable, and that’s been a big contributor to vinyl’s decline in the past twenty years. But when everyone’s tuned entirely into the digital, perhaps the sanctity of vinyl can return.
OK Mr. Waves Red Flags in Front of Bulls: I cannot let you get by with this comment without remark:
“With how liberal a place Sweden is I am surprised that…”
Jackboots come in pairs, just like other boots. The jackboot is not a Right Foot Only brand. And once that boot is embedded firmly in your neck, it’s pretty pointless to question whether it’s a right foot or left foot.
All I’m saying is that the left boot is usually a little more socialist and willing to share.
Just one thing I’d like to know – from what point will ISPs erase ip addresses, i.e from previously (before the law was passed) or currently? What about the other ISPs – will they follow suit as well and erase their data? Following closely in prague here.
Here is an article that talks a little bit more about it. Although it doesn’t specify how far back the ISP’s will go to erase IP addresses, the law does state that they are only supposed to keep the IP addresses for a certain period of time before they are expunged. The CEO of Tele2 said:
Which leads me to believe that they will discontinue storing IP addresses starting immediately and when the time limit for the stored, older IP addresses has expired then they will no longer have any on file. If that makes sense.