file sharers

For more than a decade Swedish netizens have been placed at the forefront of mainstream file-sharing culture, mainly through their historic links to the thriving BBS and warez scene (not to mention bandwidth on tap), but more recently due to their association with The Pirate Bay and similar sites.

In the early part of the last decade when they were still the innocent side of 15-years-old, one schoolfriend showed another an Iomega ZIP drive (right) full of ‘warez’ – games and software with a big fat zero written on their price tag.

More than half a decade ago, the RIAA sued tens of thousands of alleged file-sharers.

While the music group settled with the majority for a few thousand dollars each, student Joel Tenenbaum chose to put up a fight.

As of today, the case is still ongoing.

In January 2010, the French authorities put in place what they believed would be the solution to the problematic issue of unauthorized online file-sharing.

Their so-called “three strikes” or “graduated response” scheme would see Internet account holders receive an official warning should their IP addresses be linked to uploads of infringing material on file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent.

During the last decade the RIAA embarked on an online anti-piracy action which would later go down as one of the most controversial ever seen.

After spending years on various educational campaigns, none of which worked, a new plan was put into motion.

It involved monitoring P2P networks for infringements, unmasking the perpetrators, and then threatening to sue unless a large ‘fine’ or settlement was paid.

The news this week that CD Projekt, the company behind The Witcher games, would cease their pay-up-or-else file-sharing settlement scheme against Internet account holders was welcome.

As highlighted dozens of times before, companies making these accusations rely on weak IP address-only evidence and use their legal teams to intimidate their targets into paying up – guilty or not.

While the RIAA has a track record of going after individual file-sharers and services such as LimeWire, the music industry has never targeted any file-sharing sites.

In October 2010 at the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Charleton acknowledged that record companies in Ireland (Warner, Universal, Sony and EMI) were being harmed by Internet piracy but that laws to cut off file-sharers and block sites were not enforceable in the country.

All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities, and the situation in Sweden is no different.

While copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.

During the second half of the year SOPA dominated much of the news, but of course there were plenty of other interesting things going on too.

Below is a selection of some of the most remarkable topics covered here on TorrentFreak in the latter part of 2011.

Part 1 (covering the first 6 months of the year) can be found here.

Feel free to add your assessment of the last year in the comments section below.