Pirate Party condemns Swedish plan to hand over file-sharers

The Swedish authorities are not letting that one go. Last week the Swedish ministers of Justice and Culture voiced in a Swedish newspaper editorial their demanding that the government establish a legal support that would allow courts to order ISPs to hand over the IP addresses of file-sharers. On the other hand the Swedish replied on its own web site, pointing the finger at the government for making a "declaration of war against an entire young generation of voters… on behalf of the American film and record companies."

As we previously informed you the government has also recently began its legal crusade against The Pirate Bay, the most popular (Swedish) BitTorrent tracker that has valiantly remained loyal to its principles of operating in spite of the persistent prior raids ( and without mentioning the numerous threats).

It seems that this proposal of the Swedish ministers appeals to ISPs because it causes a somewhat shift of the burden of copyright enforcement on the content industry instead of placing all of it on telecommunications companies. Howeve,r recently, there was another kind of proposal that recommended that ISPs should be ordered to not block the service for those who constantly infringe the copy right by downloading copyrighted content from file-sharing networks.

As we learn from Ars Technica the Swedish news site The Local emphasized the shift of the Center Party in addressing the matter of IP disclosure after it had previously declared its opposition against anti-piracy solutions that would compromise privacy. This is all the more interesting as at the same time the European Parliament is busy weighing up whether IP addresses should be classified as personal information consequently have them legally protected.

The Pirate Party point out a totally different view of matter – after seeing how the film and recording companies usually act – mainly using the threat of costly lawsuit to get their hands on out-of-court settlements from accused file-sharers in the US (having previously obtained identifying information from ISPs), the Pirate Party warns about the danger of such mafia-like actions spread in Sweden : "They can threaten suspects with a ruinous level of damages in order to force them to 'voluntarily' pay a settlement… The government has a choice: either it can accept that file sharing is a technological and historical fact, or it can continue to dismantle democracy and the rule of law to protect an out-of-date industry."

There’s little doubt that the next item on the Swedish government's agenda will be legislative amendments to create the framework for litigation against file-sharers.