Swedish IT Minister Was Reported to Police for Copyright Violation

While chasing copyright infringers in Sweden continues, the local Pirate Party decided to hold up a mirror to the politicians calling for the tough enforcement regime. So, the Pirate Party started with reporting the country’s IT Minister to the police after the latter was found infringing copyright on the Internet a few times.

The issue of online file-sharing is lively discussed today, mostly thanks to the complaints made by the multinational corporations producing and distributing music, movies and games. However, despite all the efforts of the lawmakers, today the largest BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, celebrates its 10-year anniversary. While the online service operates as usual, Internet users worldwide are subjected to very tough copyright regimes, like facing $150,000 fines for sharing a single track in the US or getting arrested for file-sharing in Sweden.

The Pirate Party has been fighting such developments for years, and today the Swedish Party has demonstrated that copyright violation isn’t really restricted to the sharing of entertaining content and that anyone – including the ministers – could violate the law at the click of a button.

The Pirate Party has discovered that the 40-year-old IT Minister, Anna-Karin Hatt, has posted copyrighted Calvin and Hobbes cartoons and the artwork for several movies including Lord of the Rings, Da Vinci Code, and Monty Python and Holy Grail. To demonstrate how breaking copyright legislation became extremely simple nowadays, the Pirate Party has decided to report Minister Hatt to the police. This is what content creators do when they find people infringing their copyrights. The Pirate Party believes that nothing will come of the complaint – prominent politicians have nothing to fear while the police forces are prosecuting file-sharing adolescents.

However, the Pirate Party doesn’t want Minister or anyone else prosecuted for such a small “crime”. On the contrary, the activists are calling for decriminalizing all “non-commercial sharing of culture and knowledge”. If they achieve success, citizens, including Hatt, will be able to share a song or a cartoon on the Internet without fear of repercussions. Indeed, it turns out that the authorities have made it impossible to live a modern life and be an online activist without being a criminal.

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