14 DAY TRIAL // The Swedish police, which has taken a hardline against online piracy, is now accused of copyright infringement for copying and using thousands of images from the Internet without permission.
In the past Sweden has been viewed as a safe haven for online pirates, mainly because it is home to The Pirate Bay, the largest torrent tracker on the Internet.
However, for the past two years the country's government has been trying to change that perception by cracking down on copyright violations.
Nevertheless, a lot of Swedes view copyright legislation as a threat to Internet freedom. This is clearly outlined by significant public support for political organizations like the Pirate Party.
According to an article in the local daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) [Google translation], the Swedish police now get to experience for themselves what the anti-copyright activists mean.
It seems that authorities have been building a database to assist investigators in matching crime scene footprints to specific types of shoes.
So far this database contains about 2,500 shoe pictures, which were apparently copied without asking for permission from various websites.
"We have previously helped the police in Sweden and abroad to identify shoes, and we are happy to continue.
"But it upsets us that they methodically and arbitrarily taken what we think are a lot of our pictures," Frederick Juto, chairman of a large online footwear store called BRANDOS, commented. [approximate translation]
The forensic analysts who worked on building the database maintain that their actions are legal, because the Swedish copyright legislation stipulates exceptions for police investigations.
This is challenged by Jan Rosén, a professor of intellectual property law at Stockholm University, who explains that this exemption applies on a per-case basis and not for a database which is used all the time.
According to BRANDOS representatives, the company pays professional photographers to take the shoe pictures published on its website.