During the immediate aftermath of the new anti piracy laws in Sweden, a ray of hope shines forth. One ISP has seen that this law is highly immoral, as it allows industry giants to waltz all over your right to privacy, and therefore they have stated that they will not keep any logs that they can possibly trash. This is pretty much equal to siding with the pirates. They have admitted that there will be cases where they won’t be able to oppose any direct orders from a court of law, but they will make an effort not to keep information any longer than they absolutely have to.
As far as marketing goes, this is a brilliant move. There is nothing illegal about switching to this Internet Service Provider, and it’s currently the only one on the market to offer such a promise, and it pretty much protects all but the most hard core pirates from juridical issues. See what happens is – and this is for all you normal people out there, so geeks can fast forward – whenever you access anything through the internet, your computer makes a call to your Internet Service Provider, ISP for short, going through whichever routers or modems you have, and the ISP fetches your data for you, and send it back. In order to do this it needs to know your IP address, which is used as an identifier for every device connected to the internet, and it needs to temporarily store the data on a server. This is all that is needed to know exactly which files are going where. While ISPs have the right to delete this confidential data, most ISPs keep logs. This means that the ISP in question, Bahnhof,
is offering a sense of security that no other ISP in Sweden is, and any smalltime pirate wanting to be safe will simply need to switch to Bahnhof, while paying the same price as anywhere else.
is offering a sense of security that no other ISP in Sweden is, and any smalltime pirate wanting to be safe will simply need to switch to Bahnhof, while paying the same price as anywhere else.See what I said about a brilliant strategy? We are all pirates! You know you’ve downloaded too, don’t try to hide it. Whether you used a torrent client, limewire, or kazaa, you’ve all done it, and the industry is after you for it. I’m sure you’ve paid for a lot of it, I’m not saying we’re horrible people here, I use iTunes Store too often, but some songs just can’t be found elsewhere, am I right? And then there was the whole DRM thing, and all of a sudden that Pirate Bay looked mighty inviting. I hope ISPs everywhere will dare to make this step. It will surely earn them a lot of money, and it’ll force the industry to come up with something besides laws to compete.
As usual, a norwegian article on the matter: ITavisen.no
Song of the Blog: He’s a Pirate
Sincerely
Bjørn
