Pirate Party reports Swedish IT minister to police for copyright violations

The Swedish Pirate Party has celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Pirate Bay torrent website by reporting the country’s strongly anti-piracy IT minister, Anna-Karin Hatt, to the police for infringing online copyright laws on several occasions.

The party has been following Hatt’s account on Instagram, where it discovered that the politician is anything but innocent when it comes to respecting the legislation which she claims to so strongly support.

The 40-year-old posted copyrighted Calvin and Hobbes cartoons as well as artwork for several movies, including The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Pirate Party’s legislative spokesman, Torbjörn Wester, wrote in his blog on the Debatt paper’s website.

“When not even the Swedish IT Minister complies with copyright law online, one can hardly expect ordinary Internet users to feel compelled to follow such an outdated law,” he said.

Wester does not believe that the complaint will result in any consequences for Hatt, as it's "just ‘ordinary’ Swedes who risk being sentenced to heavy fines and damages for the same thing the minister has done.” 

He explained that the move isn’t aimed at seeing the IT minister punished, but rather at showing that the law - which makes everybody who wants to lead a modern life and be active on the web “a criminal” - isn’t working.

The Pirate Party’s stance is that “freely sharing culture and knowledge is a normal social behavior” and therefore all non-commercial distribution of intellectual property must be decriminalized.

The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), which came in 2009 as an amendment to the Swedish Copyright Act of 1960, has made it easier for copyright holders to get their hands on the personal details of suspected illicit file sharers.

The controversial legislation, which carries huge fines and even imprisonment for perpetrators, went ahead despite 48 per cent of the population speaking out against it, a Sifo poll revealed.