The Swedish Government decided to take measures against filesharers

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

Although initially the Swedish Government promised not to hunt down young
people for filesharing, on 14 March 2008, it made a proposal that will allow
courts to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to give up IP addresses
used for illegal filesharing to the owners of the fileshared material.

The government’s present proposal means the rejection of the previous
alternative proposed by Appeals Court judge Cecilia Renfors who was
suggesting ISPs should shut down users who repeatedly downloaded copyrighted
material without permission.

ISPs welcomed the government decision considering that Renfors’ proposal
would have put the providers “in a position of having to police our own
customers” as said Marcus Nylén, Bredbandsbolaget’s CEO. Martin Tivéus, head
of ISP Glocalnet also stated: “It is important that the new copyright laws
will take into account users’ rightful interest in their own personal
integrity. (…) Neither we as a provider nor the Anti-Piracy Agency can or
should make a decision as to when copyright is more important than personal
integrity. For this reason it feels good that the government will hand this
task to the courts.”

Pirate Party and Pirate Bay had a totally different reaction.
“This is a declaration of war on an entire generation of young voters,” said
Rickard Falkvinge, Pirate Party leader, who also said that the government
should take filesharing as a” techno-historical fact”. Peter Sunde from
Pirate Bay described the move as “completely the wrong way to go and an
affront to personal integrity”.

According to Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask and Minister of Culture Lena
Adelsohn Liljeroth, the government was not united in the decision but even
the parties that were reluctant to the proposal accepted to compromise on
the matter. One of those was the Central Party which had previously stated
it would not support any policy leading to the release of IP addresses to
the court. “It’s not possible to get things 100 percent your own way in
negotiations. It was with a degree of regret that we agreed to go along with
this,” said the party’s spokeswoman Annie Johansson.

The ministers pointed out however that in order for the ISP to reveal an IP
address, the rights owners must be able to prove that the respective
Internet service subscription has been used for illegal filesharing.

Sweden to clamp down on file sharing (14.03.2008)
http://www.thelocal.se/10474/20080314/

A declaration of war on Sweden’s youth (14.03.2008)
http://www.thelocal.se/10492/20080314/

EDRi-gram: Sweden wants tougher laws against file sharers (18.07.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.14/sweden-file-sharing