Friday, May 15, 2009

A Tongue in Cheek Plagiarism

One of the Swedish defendants in the Pirate Bay case in which the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, IFPI, took the owners of the Pirate Bay site to court and won millions of Swedish crowns) has set up a site http://www.internetavgift.se/ which is a plagiarism of the Swedish TV license site http://www.radiotjanst.se/. In many European countries you have to pay a license to watch TV, the fees are used to pay for public broadcasting. Many people feel that this is very problematic, as they do not watch public broadcasting, preferring the private channels (which have advertising).

On the page they present a very complicated formula for figuring out the tax - which amounts to one Swedish crown, which is the smallest amount that can be transferred from one account to the next. The account which is listed for payment is the account of the lawyers for IFPI.

In Sweden, your bank will charge you up to 20 crowns (about $2.50) for money put into your account. In addition, the lawyers are legally required to do all sorts of bookkeeping tasks around any money they take in. The lawyers have threatened to find some way of forcing them to take down this site.

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