Sweden's Notorious Distinction as a Haven for Online Pirates

JUNE 17, 2015
Internet piracy is a global problem, but few countries have become as associated with the practice as Sweden. Its reputation can mostly be attributed to The Pirate Bay, a notorious hub for illegal file-sharing of movies and other media that was started in Sweden in 2003 and ever since has been a target of the global entertainment industry. Its founders, once treated like rock stars in their native country, have been jailed, while the website itself is blocked by a growing list of countries, including, most recently, Russia.

Despite all this, The Pirate Bay remains defiant, spawning mirror versions and recently rebranding with a logo featuring a hydra whose many heads — each sporting a different domain extension — are meant to symbolize how difficult it will be to kill.

Why is piracy such a problem in Sweden? According to a new report, 280 million films or television shows were illegally viewed (streamed or downloaded) there last year — equivalent to a loss of $100 million in revenue, or about 25 percent of the value of the entire Swedish film and TV industry. The report, published by Sweden’s Film and TV Industry Cooperation Committee (an advocacy group for the country’s entertainment industry), included a survey that found that nearly a third of Swedes regularly watch pirated films or television shows. Among those aged 16 to 29, the number jumps to two-thirds. A large chunk of the Swedes who pirate media (42 percent) say they believe the practice is wrong but do it anyway.

Per Stromback, an author who studies digital trade for the committee, said that what sets Sweden apart from other countries isn’t how much pirated content is consumed domestically — this is marginal when compared with the tally in countries like China or the United States — but the fact that Sweden has become one of the world’s largest sources of such content.

“We cause problems for other people,” Mr. Stromback said. “We’re almost like a country that burns a lot of fossil fuels and is releasing a disproportionate amount of CO2, polluting the atmosphere.”

Mr. Stromback said that while a number of factors contributed to the rise of piracy in Sweden — including a big investment in broadband Internet in the late 1990s that gave would-be pirates the bandwidth to do their worst — it’s still ironic that Sweden became a “haven for pirates.”

“Sweden is known for being law-abiding. We always score high on global rankings in terms of how much trust we place in institutions,” he said. “But there is also an anti-authoritarian streak in the Swedish mindset. Just look at moonshine. Alcohol sales are strictly regulated in Sweden, and as a result moonshine becomes a very big thing in the Swedish countryside.”

As dire as the piracy situation in Sweden is — and Mr. Stromback calls it “unsustainable” at current levels — another Swedish-made product might offer the blueprint for a solution. That is Spotify, whose exhaustive catalog and free or paid subscription models have contributed to a drop in music piracy. In an interview this year, Fredrik Ekander, the head of Sweden’s Cosmos Music Group, explained why that might be.

“There are a lot of steps you need to take to pirate a music file,” he said. “You have to find your torrent client, go to the pirate site, search for your file, download. At each point, most people will think: ‘I’d rather not be doing this.’ Spotify gave people that alternative.”