Jon Healey, Editorial Writer, Los Angeles Times

File "Sharing" or "Stealing"?

February 20, 2008 at 12:02 am PT

A few days ago I came across an op-ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate Party–a pro-business party that’s akin to this country’s Libertarians (except in Sweden they’re more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid’s new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn’t actually theft.

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Tagged with: copyright, DMCA, download, fair use, file sharing, Jon Healey, Karl Sigfrid, Los Angeles Times, Sweden

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