The industry is trying to make filesharers look like dangerous criminals. Unfortunately some law enforcement officials and courts have swallowed the bait. Throwing teenagers in jail for doing what everyone else is doing is a deliberate attempt to scare the public – the tactical equivalent of shooting every tenth prisoner first to make the survivors talk.
During the Finreactor investigation policemen have confiscated dozens of computers, but they have not been able to present any “illegal” material as evidence – only hundreds of pages of printouts with names of files and links. As they can not link the alleged illegal copying – or sharing – to the accused individuals in a reliable manner, the prosecution can do nothing else but to attack Finreactor, filesharing and P2P networks as a whole and as such.
In their panic reaction against new technology the industry wanted someone to be guilty and to suffer. In the Finreactor case at least, the ones who got caught were merely unlucky. As courts in different countries are deciding one way or the other without a clear pattern, what we are seeing is random justice at best.
