According to this article, filesharers compete with eachother to get the highest rank by downloading a lot of illegal stuff. There is much money generated from this, even though I can’t understand how anyone could make money from people who doesn’t want to pay… They name their sources, and ofcourse gives us a link to the site that has this prestigious ranking.

Curious as I am, I wanted to see this list of illegal filesharers. Who is the most evil one in Sweden? But I can’t find it! Can anyone help me? The list is supposed to be here: www.swecheck.net

Or is it possible that this was all a lie?

I go to the next source I can find (thanks to opassande). Note that this is just a summary of a report that has been produced by Value Formation in cooporation with Lunds University.

In this summary we can read that the entertainment industry has grown steadily for the past years, and we can see that so has illegal filesharing. The latter has grown faster, and I draw a conclusion, that in order to gerate a buy, you must spread the product to a number of people before it ends up in a computer whose owner will get excited and go and buy the product.

I think this is the best part:

  • The Musicindustry whent from anlog (LP) to digital (CD) format and on to digital distribution (MP3) via internet.
  • When transitioning from LP to CD the existing model of business worked well.
  • When transitioning from CD to MP3, the industry did not react fast enough to the need for new businesmodels. This contributed to the fast growth of illegal filesharing. Sales of CD’s was cut in halp in four years time.
  • Note that it was an actor outside the (music) industry (Apple) that created the first successfull businesmodel for legal downloading.

Note that when transitioning from CD to MP3, everyone finds it totally normal to measure success by counting sold CD’s. I would say that is pretty messed up right there, but then I don’t even have a dregree!

The conclusion I make from this text is that an industry that does not act fast enough to new conditions will fail, and lose money. What conclusion I don’t make is the one where it would be necessary to sue costumers for not giving you money when you are not giving the customer what it wants to buy at the right price…

SvD also lists www.Piratebay.se as a source, but I have no idea what they looked at there, so it’s hard to judge if they are correct. All comments in the article conserning tpb is made by Pontén, and we all know he’s lying all the time, so I will not even try to debunk what he says.

And then there is the report from Antipiratbyrån. I can’t find it on their website, and would have sent them an email to ask about it, IF they had one. Maybe I’ll pretend to be one of them tomorrow and call them and see if I can get my hands on the report. I would LOVE to know what their sources are!