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Deutsch: Das neue schwedische Anti-Piraterie-Gesetz stiftet Unruhe unter Filesh...

As already foreseen this summer, the Swedish recording industry is using the new anti-piracy IPRED law to chase filesharers.

On 7 December 2009, the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) filed a suit with the district court in Stockholm against Direct Connect (DC) file sharing network, trying to force the site to reveal the identity of a user suspected of illegal file sharing.

IPFI has investigated a number of file sharing cases until now but this is the first case they have decided to go to court with. "We want to take one at a time. It's a new law and we have to learn how to do this, what the courts want in terms of evidence to be sure that they're not compromising anyone's privacy," stated Ludvig Werner, head of IFPI in Sweden.

IFPI has decided to take DC to court although the network is no longer the strongest on the market. "BitTorrent technology is superior for moving large files, but DC is more of a social network. You connect to a hub and are there throughout the day, chatting and exchanging files with one another, sort of like a youth recreation centre on the internet, even if it's not only young people who are there."

The dramatic 40% drop in the Internet traffic even the night before the law entered into force on 1 April 2009 (according to the statistics of an ISP coordination organisation) seemed to contradict the experts who had believed IPRED would not have such a big effect on file sharing in Sweden.

Yet, after the serious decline in April, file sharing has gradually recovered and in November the Internet traffic surpassed the previous all-time high, reported in March. Certainly, there are other factors besides file sharing that might have contributed to the increase of the traffic.

"There is guaranteed to be certain increase in file sharing, but it isn't possible to tell exactly how much. (...) Then you have the illegal video streaming sites, which aren't file sharing in the traditional sense, but which play the same role for users. Watching a movie via a streaming video directly in your web browser is becoming more and more popular" said researcher Kristoffer Schollin. In his opinion, in time, these video steaming sites might gain field in front of file sharing. Anyway, it appears that file-sharing is still increasing.

Music industry to test Sweden's anti-piracy law (7.12.2009)
http://www.thelocal.se/23698/20091207/

File sharing in Sweden nears record high (6.12.2009)
http://www.thelocal.se/23680/20091206/

EDRi-gram: Swedish court: IP addresses are personal data (1.07.2009)
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.13/sweden-ip-addresses-personal-...