The entertainment industry declared a huge win after a Swedish court convicted the founders of Pirate Bay of copyright infringement. But a win isn’t always a win. The ruling helped galvanize Sweden’s Pirate Party, increasing their numbers by more than three times and helping them win two seats in the recent European Parliament elections.

The Pirate Party seeks to reform intellectual property laws to be more balanced with consumer and civil rights.  Further support for the party came after Sweden passed a law requiring ISPs to turn over user information upon request (even without a warrant or evidence), leading several ISPs to refuse to save any user records.

The Pirate Party party won its seats with more than 200,000 votes, approximately 7 percent of Sweden’s voting population (and 19 percent of voters under 30).  The party has risen to being the third largest in Sweden.

So even though the entertainment industry can claim a win in the Pirate Bay trial (for now at least, since the judge is being investigated for bias), that win helped awaken a social movement against the industry and its causes. Maybe the entertainment industry will start realizing harsh copyright laws and obsolete business models are not the best ways to build a customer base.

Prison Break attracted more than six million TV viewers for its season premiere. Another two million downloaded the episode over the next week even though the episode was available for free on Fox.com.

Fox believes most of those downloads came from Europe where Prison Break isn’t available on TV or online.  TorrentFreak found only 4 percent of downloads came from the U.S.

TorrentFreak concludes availability is a key factor when people download from BitTorrent.  Price is not the only consideration.  Joss Whedon’s recent Dr. Horrible web series was streamed free on the web but became a top seller on iTunes for a price because people wanted a convenient, downloadable version to watch when and where they wanted.

This is why media companies should view file-sharing networks as competitors feeding a market need.  Other countries want to watch popular TV shows, but networks delay them for weeks if not months. Even websites Fox.com and Hulu only allow North American viewers, sending millions of international users to file-sharing networks.

The market wants easily available, convenient TV shows, movies, and music.  They keep showing this with their time and dollars. Media companies should pay attention to what the market wants.

Several fiber optic companies in Amsterdam are testing 1 gigabit connections, internet speeds fast enough for four simultaneous HD movies at once.

The U.S. has been crawling behind Europe, Asia, and even Canada in broadband speeds and penetration.  Instead of rolling out fiber optic connections like Japan and Amsterdam, U.S. cable providers are imposing bandwidth caps.  Only Verizon offers high speed fiber optics in the U.S., which only gives speeds of 50 Mb/s, can cost almost $150, and is only available in a few major cities.

The U.S. suffers from a technological disconnect, only one part of our suffering infrastructure.  As more and more business and information moves online, countries with strong broadband infrastructures will have a competitive edge.  The Baller Herbst Law Group wrote a report on how the U.S. needs universal gigabits speeds by 2015 to stay economically competitive. But the U.S. lacks a broadband strategy like the successful seven year rollout in Japan.

In 2001, when the United States ranked 4th in the world, Japan had only a small handful of broadband lines. Spurred by the “broadband miracle” under way in nearby South Korea, Japan’s top government and private-sector leaders decided to make Japan the world’s leading broadband nation. They then developed and executed an all-hands-on-deck action plan to achieve that goal, including aggressive federal subsidies, low-interest and no-interest loans, loan guarantees, tax breaks, grants-in-aid to municipalities, targeted government purchases of services, a concerted national public education campaign, and a wide range of private-sector initiatives driven by a sense of national purpose and long-term thinking.

Today, Japan has the fastest and cheapest broadband in the world. Consumers in Japan can get broadband that is 10 times faster than the speeds available to average Americans, for prices that are less than a quarter of the prices that Americans must pay. Broadband providers currently compete at 1 Gbps, and this is expected to increase to 10 Gbps by 2010. Broadband is now available almost ubiquitously throughout Japan, and the “almost” will be removed by 2010. Today, 85 percent of households have access to fiber connectivity, and more than 35 percent of households have adopted it. Availability of fiber connective it will increase to 90 percent by 2010.

The U.S. ranks 15th in median broadband speeds at 2.35 megabits per second, behind Japan’s 63 mb/s.

To say the U.S. does nothing isn’t true.  Much of U.S. policy has hurt broadband penetration and competition.  The FCC uses provenly false methods of tracking cable competition and still pushes a 30 percent limit on cable company subscriber base.

While penalizing cable companies, the FCC lets telecommunication companies consolidate while doing away with common carrier requirements that have been vital to Japan’s success and would help increase competition.

The U.S. needs a broadband strategy that includes federal subsides and low-interest loans to encourage development.  These incentives ensure broadband will reach even the poorest areas and keep the United States competitive with the rest of the world. It will be expensive to full deploy fiber connections country wide.  Estimates in the U.K. are between $9 and $50 billion. As Japan (and Australia) have shown, results can be seen within a few years to the benefit of companies and citizens.

This is an issue unfortunately being ignored this election year.  When the next generation of Microsofts, Googles, and Apples originate in South Korea and Denmark, then the U.S. may get a clue.  But by then we might be too far behind to play catch up.

My many issues with copyrights and patents stem from them being used for reasons beyond their intention.  These government granted monopolies are meant to encourage people to create new works of arts and inventions.

This is why I’m confused by the European Union’s decision to extend copyrights for musicians by 45 years.  If musicians made music before this extension, that means the original copyright deal worked - artists were rewarded with 50 years of control over their work.  But now all those musicians get another 45 years and what does the rest of Europe get? A copyright system used for welfare.

Irish EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy didn’t hide the fact.

I am not talking about featured artists like Cliff Richard or Charles Aznavour. I am talking about the thousands of anonymous session musicians who contributed to sound recordings in the late fifties and sixties. They will no longer get airplay royalties from their recordings. But these royalties are often their sole pension.

It’s not the government’s job to retroactively create a pension system specific to one field. What about the airline workers loosing their agreed upon pensions? I don’t see governments stepping into make airlines pay these workers for every plane they helped run.

The irony is the Gowers Report on Intellectual Property conducted in the United Kingdom found that extending copyrights would be more harmful. The writer of the report, Andrew Gowers, later added that he thought copyrights should be lessened.

The United States had its own copyright laws extended in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

John Grapper of the Financial Times points out (registration required) U.S.’s lagging infrastructure from worn out roads to spotty cell coverage and poor broadband penetration.

If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

Throw this on the pile with healthcare and green technology and it’s scary to think how the richest country in the world can keep calling itself that.  Creative Class Exchange and Economist’s View echo Grapper’s concerns. Thomas Friedman wrote in The World is Flat how he traveled up and down Japan on the bullet train, easily sending emails all along the way.  I compare London’s amazing subways with a new train every 2-3 minutes to Boston’s horrendous 10-20 minute waits, even during peak hours (and don’t get me started on the $20 billion Big Dig).

This faulting infrastructure costs U.S. money and productivity.  We can’t get municipal wireless into major cities and the FCC would rather limit cable companies than let them spread broadband around the country.

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