I assume I’m not the only person making this connection, but it’s interesting how successful the entertainment industry (and anyone with an intellectual-property axe to grind)  has been in making this rhetoric commonly accepted:

Ludvig Werner, the boss of IFPI’s local Swedish chapter, had a somewhat different perspective: The Pirate Bay is about keeping money out of creators’ hands and putting it into Pirate Bay pockets. “Copyright exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world—from the artist to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV programme maker—can choose how their creations are distributed and get fairly rewarded for their work,” he said in a statement. [from the trial against the Pirate Bay in Sweden]

And this is from the United States’ Constitution—though obviously (I hope) not in force in Sweden:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Not that I agree with the Pirate Bay’s methodologies, but as I’ve written before, this isn’t the first time that copyright rhetoric has been manipulated… all the way back to the 19th century.