Magnus Bråth is a Swedish expert in digital marketing and SEO. He is known for his ability to explain complex topics in a simple and easy to understand way. Magnus has extensive experience in search engine optimization, content strategy and digital communication, and he regularly shares his knowledge through lectures, articles and training. His focus is on helping companies grow online through smart and sustainable digital strategies.
The year was 2006, and Sweden was in the middle of a conflict. On one side were the American RIAA and the Swedish Antipiratbyrån. On the other side were The Pirate Bay and what would later become the Pirate Party. The tone was incredibly heated. According to both camps, everyone on the other side was working toward the total collapse of society. That was when I decided to stick my neck out.
Privacy and personal freedom mattered to me in 2006. I really did not think the state should interfere with people’s online communication, and in the hunt for file sharers, that seemed unavoidable.
Unfortunately, almost nothing remains from that time. I am not the kind of person who saves things. That is why Grok had to help me recreate the T-shirt that amazed the world.
I was a student at the time and lived in Uppsala. You could say that the atmosphere there was not exactly friendly toward the American pursuit of young people sharing songs with each other. One warm summer day, I came up with the idea for the file sharing insurance Tankafritt.nu. I built a website, opened a postal giro account and sent out a press release. Aftonbladet was the first to pick up the story on June 23, 2006.
Then everything took off. The T-shirt you would receive if the insurance paid out, with the text “I was convicted of file sharing and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”, struck a chord with the press and the public. A few days later, someone had translated it into English, and it immediately reached the top of Digg.com, which at the time was the major gathering place for internet news.
The site received 350,000 visitors in one day, and as a result, everyone started writing about Tankafritt. The site received so many links that Google penalized it, and for a long time you could not even find it when searching for its name. Print newspapers and radio stations around the world jumped on the story, and I spent my days giving interviews.
When the Financial Times put me on the front page, unfortunately in the print newspaper, and I no longer have the copy, so I cannot show it, the phone rang from an unexpected direction. Record label executive Terry McBride wanted to collaborate.
The reason was that the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, had targeted a 13-year-old girl who had shared music by Avril Lavigne. At the time, you automatically shared files when you downloaded them. The RIAA did not care whether the girl was 13 or not and chose to sue her for several million dollars. When Avril found out about it, she started crying, and that made Terry take a stand. No hunting their fans. Nettwerk simply was not interested in suing its own fans.
The RIAA completely ignored that. In the United States, permission from the copyright holder is not needed to pursue file sharers. The only solution Terry and Avril could come up with was to pay any possible fines. In other words, the same idea I had.
At the same time back home
Meanwhile in Sweden, there were people who disliked me quite a lot. Questions from newspapers started appearing. One person spread the rumor that I had taken the company’s money and escaped to some island in the South Pacific, presumably to waste away without Swedish snus.
In total, there were 3,600 articles about the company and me, as far as I have been able to determine. Everything from blogs to the world’s largest newspapers, TV channels and a great many radio broadcasts. I spent the entire autumn giving interviews. It never became a major financial success, but the work paid for my studies.
In the end, we never paid out any money. None of the members, it was not an insurance company but a fund you joined, similar to an unemployment insurance fund, were convicted. In fact, convictions stopped coming altogether, and my guess is that the Swedish Antipiratbyrån simply gave up, partly thanks to me.
A few years later, I shut down Tankafritt.nu, mostly because it did not fit very well with a career in SEO. I did not want to be in the spotlight in that way. The fact that I would later end up in at least as much press coverage with our six hour workday is another story.