The peer-to-peer file-swapping wars have reportedly reached Sweden: A proposed law to ban swapping of copyrighted material online without paying royalties is said to have raised tensions in a country where legal loopholes are believed to make it hard, if not impossible, to stop file swapping.
Published reports April 3 indicated the Swedish government and entertainment industries are anxious to prosecute Internet file swappers, as the U.S. film and music industries have attempted, but some in the Scandinavian country say implementing such a law would be highly doubtful.
"There is an incredibly tense atmosphere here,” said Swedish Antipiracy Agency legal cousel Henrik Ponten to the French news wire Agence France-Presse. “I have had a number of threats made against me personally.” His group, in fact, has already begun trying to crack down on file swapping through “the foggy framework” of current Swedish copyright law, AFP reported.
"We want to cure the lack of clarity in the law so that regular people know" which material is legal and which illegal, Justice Minister Thomas Bodstreom told Expressen in March about the proposed law.
The Swedish music industry sings a tune similar to that sung by the Recording Industry Association of America, claiming Swedish record industry revenues have fallen 30 percent since 2001, according to Lars Gustafsson, the chief executive of Sweden’s branch of the International Federation of the Phonograph Industry. Gustafsson said that “at least part” of the fall was due to illegal music downloading.
Ponten said online piracy in Sweden outpaces such activities in any other European country. He said at least 500,000 of Sweden’s 9 million residents use peer-to-peer file swapping programs to get and post films, music, and computer games online, with about 15 million such illegal copies downloaded annually.
Three Swedish opposition political parties have pledged to vote against the proposed law when it comes to parliamentary debate May 25, AFP reported. "Why should we criminalize the downloaders?” asked Johan Linder, a Member of Parliament for the Center Party. “It is often impossible for people to know whether what they see on the Internet has been put there legally or illegally.”
