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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Ok, that's interesting then. That suggests that the typical Swedish person feels that sharing copyrighted content is a heinous crime, on par with homicide.

Do you think that's accurate?

Why would the average person feel so strongly negative about this topic?

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Swede chiming in here. No. The typical Swede feels that it's one of the less serious crimes there is. Under speeding, far under DUI, under possession of drugs for personal use, maybe on par with parking violation.

We had quite a movement for digital freedom about a decade ago when the Pirate Party was on the rise and there was opposition against surveillance from FRA (Swedish equivalent of NSA), but the average person doesn't care and I think even the previous activists have been in a state of fatigue and silent acceptance for years now.

I would imagine that Swedish politicians are also vulnerable from lobbying and US diplomatic pressure.

Indeed. Antipiratbyrån (The Anti-Piracy Bureau) was a lobby organization representing copyright holders in films and computer games until 2011. They surveilled people, breaching privacy laws but got exempted in court because it was done for a good cause. Infiltrated a Swedish ISP, tracked down filesharers online and took them to court and influenced the political debate a lot.

I don't have any illusion of lobbying and diplomatic pressure having lessened since.

> got exempted in court because it was done for a good cause.

Wow...as described here, your legal system sounds...useless.

It is very bad indeed.

1. The judge in the pirate bay case was a member of an organisation "Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt"/"The Swedish Organisation for Copyright" (my own translation), and it was decided not to be partial to the pirate bay case. See for example [0].

2. Even if there were diplomatic pressures on Sweden from the US (which there were [1], their actual impact is what is in question), it should be impossible for a minister to influence the police directly [2]. Which makes for the pirate bay take down to be a ridiculous coincidence.

3. Sweden allows lawyers with their own, so called, "intellectual property" interests to defend suspects of file-sharing. See for example [3] which do give credit for this lawyer doing a good job, but just in principle this seems absurd (imo). I hope he is not allowed to be the defence lawyer if it is his own material at least.

[0] (Swedish, summary in English) https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/3800...

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-do...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerstyre

[3] (Swedish) https://overklass.wordpress.com/tag/fildelning/

> That suggests that the typical Swedish person feels that sharing copyrighted content is a heinous crime, on par with homicide.

Well... I'm not sure that's how you should see it. For example, skimming the document I mentioned, they have a section "Konsekvensanalys"/Analysis of consequences. There they address for example socio-economic impact, but not "popular opinion on the matter", or similar.

I think it would be more appropriate to see the investigation as objective (to some degree), and the final voting by the parties (on a potential future bill) as their considerations how this would impact their popularity. If the objective conclusion is that X should be done, a party may still not vote to implement X because of peoples opinion on the matter.

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