14 DAY TRIAL // Though Sweden has a population of only about 9 million people, a new statistic says that 700,000 citizens often used illegal peer-to-peer transfers in the first three months of 2008, amassing a total of more than 605,100 files. The report was prompted by recent allegations against the country, which was accused of being a safe haven for Internet pirates.
The country hosts the Pirate Bay servers, a site that is among the most used on the Net, for illegal downloads of music, videos and other copyrighted data. Downloading such materials illegally causes great damages to the companies that own the copyrights, because downloading a music album from these sites means that the person behind the download will not buy the album, and therefore give money to both the artist and the label.
More than a third of all men aged 16 to 24 used a peer-to-peer file sharing program during the first quarter of 2008. "Among all surveyed ages the corresponding proportion is approximately one out of 10. The number of women using peer-to-peer file sharing is less than half than that of men," says the paper, released by the Statistics Sweden organization.
In light of the new study, conducted on over 3,500 people, central authorities are currently seeking to introduce new Internet laws in effect, which would resemble those in the European Union. These regulations force service providers to supply control commissions with the IPs that users employ to download illegal content from the Internet.
Civil rights movements and freedom advocates argue that this legislation will make it easier for authorities to abuse their power, tracking down all movements that users make on the Web, which they say it's unacceptable. And while officials say that the system would be used only for the apprehension of those who do illegal tasks on the Internet, most people find it difficult to accept that someone will be monitoring the way they behave on-line.