Sweden to enforce anti-file sharing law

Scandinavia is taking more drastic measures against illegal file sharing, especially when music files are concerned. Sweden enforced a new law last week, which bans the sharing on the Internet of copyrighted materials, if the respective royalties are not paid.

Up until now, the law provisioned that the Swedish had the right to download copyrighted movies and music, provided that they didn't share them with other Internet surfers.

Earlier this year, a Swedish prosecutor had already pressed charges against an Internet user which had shared a movie with other users, this case being the first one in which a Swedish Internet surfer was brought before a court of law on such charges. The court ruled that the defendant willingly shared the respective movie with about 300 other users, thus breaking the copyright law.

Moreover, the defendant from Sandefjord saved the movie on a server belonging to the company he was working for (telephone operator NetCom) in order to facilitate the transfer at very high speeds. Following a raid organized by the police, over 60,000 pirate copies of the music files of different movies shared on the Internet have been discovered.

The sad part is (at least for the perpetrator) is that several movie producers and record companies threatened that, should the defendant be found guilty, they will ask for compensatory claims.