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The Swedish Justice Department initiated the public debate process on a new legislation that will allow the copyright holders to obtain the identity of people that share illegal content over in the Internet.

The draft says that the copyright holders can go to court asking the ISPs to reveal the names of the people allegedly violating intellectual property laws.

The Justice Department statement explained the purpose of the draft: "Thereby, it will become easier to intervene against illegal file-sharing, which in turn will stimulate the development of legal alternatives for distribution of, for example, film and music over the Internet."

Tobias Andersson, press spokesman for Piratbyrån, was critical of the new act: "The danger here is that it will speed up the development of anonymous file-sharing programmes that make it technically more difficult to trace somebody's internet use. These kinds of services can also be exploited by people involved in criminal activities, such as paedophiles".

Sweden's legislation stipulates that downloading movie and music files is illegal and the Police has also tried to shut down PirateBay, the popular file sharing site. The latest attempt announced by the Swedish Pirate Party was to classify it as a child pornography site on the blacklist that Swedish Internet Providers need to respect. An update to the blacklist should have included The Pirate Bay: "This means that anyone from Sweden visiting the well-known file sharing site The Pirate Bay will be greeted by a block page from the Police Board saying they're not allowed to visit child pornography sites."

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Pirate Party, commented: "Once given the means to shut down unwanted sites, the Police uses the filter to shut down the Pirate Bay after the failed attempt last year. And just like last year, through abuse of procedure."

Later info from the Swedish Police shows that Pirate Bay will not be included on the child pornography sites list, claiming that the alleged child pornography files were removed by the Pirate Bay webmasters. However, the administrators of the website deny this information : "The police has not given us one single hint on what content on the site has been containing child porn - and the things we have filtered out has been proven not to be child porn either."

Swedish ministry proposes tougher file-sharing laws (9.07.2007)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL0988308720070710

Swedish Police Shuts Down Pirate Bay - Again (6.07.2007)
http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/press_release_swedish_police_shuts_...

Police take credit wrongfully (9.07.2007)
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/78

Fresh clampdown on internet piracy (9.07.2007)
http://www.thelocal.se/7835/