The law, which gives rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers, was met with fierce resistance from ISPs and the public at large.

At the same time, however, there were plenty of signs that the law stopped people from pirating. A day after it went into effect, Netnod Internet Exchange reported a significant drop in Swedish Internet traffic.

Inspired by the anecdote, the effectiveness of IPRED has become a topic of interest for economists at Uppsala University in Sweden. In a new paper they report their findings on the effect of the anti-piracy law on Internet traffic and music sales.

The main goal of the research is to examine whether the anti-piracy law did indeed have an effect, and to what extent. To make sure that the effect is unique to Sweden, both Norway and Finland were chosen as control groups.

The results, which will be published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, confirm that Internet traffic decreased quite a bit after IPRED went into effect, beginning abruptly the very same day.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, music sales also skyrocketed compared to the other two Scandinavian countries.

“We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 16% and increased music sales by 36% during the first six months. Pirated music therefore seems to be a strong substitute to legal music,” the researchers write, summarizing the results.

Interestingly, however, the overall effect on Internet traffic and music sales vanished after half a year. The only effect that remained was the increase in digital sales. Internet traffic and physical music sales returned to normal, in part because the chance of getting caught is quite low.

“The deterrent effect decreased quickly, possibly because of the few and slow legal processes. Law enforcement through convictions therefore seems to be a necessary ingredient for the long-run success of a copyright protection law,” the researchers note.

The researchers suggest that if more people are convicted, the effects may last longer. During the first few years only a handful of file-sharers were brought to justice, while hundreds of thousands took steps to circumvent the law.

“As the first court cases were only settled recently, it is still possible that further convictions would restore an effect that is more long-lasting,” they write in their conclusion.

The question remains, however, whether bankrupting people or throwing them in jail is the ideal strategy in the long run…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

That answer to that question has been a long time coming and has its roots in two cases dating back more than three years.

In the first case, initiated following the 2009 introduction of the IPRED legislation in Sweden, five book publishers delivered a request to a district court.

Led by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, the publishers wanted to force the ISP Ephone to provide the personal details of one of their subscribers who they claim uploaded 2000 audio books to a server, 27 of which in breach of copyright.

In June 2009 the district court ordered Ephone to hand over the information to Antipiratbyrån. The ISP objected, arguing that the request was not in line with the data retention directive, and took the case to the Court of Appeal. The ruling of the district court was eventually overturned and the case was sent to Sweden’s Supreme Court for consideration.

The Supreme Court sought the advice of the European Court of Justice which responded in April 2012 stating that the data retention directive does not preclude the handing over of information on alleged infringers in civil cases as long as certain conditions are met (detailed analysis here).

The case went back to Sweden’s Supreme Court for its decision, one that would affect the privacy of another individual in a second important case. He or she is the alleged administrator of the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker and was also targeted under IPRED.

That case was also initiated in 2009 just after IPRED kicked in. Four movie studios applied to the Södertörn District Court in an attempt to force ISP TeliaSonera to hand over the personal details of the individual.

In December that year the district court said that TeliaSonera must hand over the name and address of the SweTorrents operator to anti-piracy groups Antipiratbyrån and Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance). Like Ephone before it, TeliaSonero was concerned over the disclosure and took the case to the Court of Appeal, but the attempt was unsuccessful and the earlier district court ruling stood.

Refusing to accept defeat TeliaSonero asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. However, the Supreme Court already had the Ephone matter to deal with and the decision there would affect the SweTorrents case.

Two days before Christmas 2012, the Supreme Court decided that the book publishers in the so-called “Bonnier Audio” case did have the right to obtain the personal details of the individual who had stored the 2000 audio books on his server.

Whether it will be possible to find the individual remains unclear. During the case Ephone went bankrupt and of course it has dragged on for such a long time further evidence will probably be long gone. Nevertheless, the publishers say the ruling will still prove useful.

Pia Janne Nyberg, a lawyer at the Swedish Publishers’ Association, said that the ruling will be used to obtain the personal details of other people sharing content online so they may be sent warning letters. At this point it is unclear if other rightsholders will chose to take things further.

With the ruling on EPhone handed down, the Supreme Court announced yesterday that it had rejected TeliaSonera’s request to have their case heard.

“The Court of Appeal’s decision stands. The decision means that TeliaSonera needs to give out the information about who was the registered user of the illegal file sharing site SweTorrents,” Rättighetsalliansen lawyer Sara Lindbäck told TorrentFreak.

“The legal system is catching up. In recent months there have been several verdicts from the courts against copyright infringers. We will now take some time and see what the next step will be,” Lindbäck concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This first test of IPRED was designed to get the personal identifying details of a subscriber who allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books on his server, 27 of which breached the publishers’ copyrights.

In June 2009 the court ordered ISP ePhone to hand over the personal details of the individual. However, ePhone protested and took the case to the court of appeal which overturned the decision and sent the case to the Supreme Court.

So could IPRED, the law created to enable copyright holders to more easily chase down copyright infringers, be used for its intended purpose? Sweden’s Supreme Court said that only the European Court of Justice could decide. Yesterday, Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen gave his advice on the matter and it was a victory for privacy which could deliver a fatal blow to IPRED, but one to which Internet service providers hold the key.

Jääskinen’s statement concluded that while no EU Directive ­ exists which prevents copyright owners requesting personal information on file-sharers from ISPs under IPRED, the data being stored by ISPs must have originally been stored for the purpose in order to be subsequently released.

“It is a victory for freedom. Although it is difficult to interpret, it is very good news,” says Christian Engstrom, MEP for the Pirate Party. “Internet service providers collect customer data to manage their operations, not to bust suspected file sharers as the copyright mafia want them to do.”

But speaking with Expressen, pro-copyright advocate Per Strömbäck says that the Supreme Court asked the ECJ only one question – Is there any conflict between the EU data retention directive and the Swedish IPRED-law? – and the response to that was a clear “no”. Further discussion on the reasons why data was originally stored was an error by the Advocate General, he believes.

Pirate Party’s Engstrom says the advice by the Advocate will mean that it will still be OK for the ISPs to disclose information to police and prosecutors in criminal cases, just not to private companies, adding that “the justice system has more important ­ things to do than to track down teenagers who listen to music.”

Indeed, ePhone’s original objection to IPRED was that it would give surveillance powers to private companies where that should be an issue for the police, so they will be pleased with the advice. Needless to say, ePhone did not store customer information for the purposes of handing it over to Antipiratbyrån.

But for now, as the advice from the Advocate General is digested by the ECJ before heading back to Sweden’s Supreme Court, increasingly Antipiratbyrån are doing just fine without help from IPRED. By conducting their activities alongside the police – who already have the necessary powers to get information from ISPs – they are getting the information they want anyway, just in other ways.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The “IPR Enforcement Directive” (IPRED) falls into this category. In short, it is filled with measures that would make it easier to clamp down on file-sharers while turning Internet providers into copyright police.

Earlier this year various stakeholders and EU citizens were given the chance to have their say on IPRED, and the results of this consultation were published today. A total of 380 responses were sent in, nearly half of which came from individuals.

There is very little consensus on the contents of the anti-piracy piracy directive. What is apparent from the summary published by the European Commission is that there’s a clear divide between copyright holders on the one hand, and citizens, Internet providers and academics on the other.

As was to be expected, the overwhelming majority of copyright holders and various collecting societies call for even stricter rules on copyright-infringement and file-sharing. They further call for greater responsibilities for Internet providers who they think should filter rogue sites and monitor copyright infringers.

Most of the responses, however, were opposing the implementation of harsher anti-piracy measures for a variety of reasons.

The Internet providers for example stress that stricter rules could have a chilling effect on innovation. They also side with the vast majority of citizens, consumer protection organisations and academics who claim that IPRED threatens basic human rights.

“The overwhelming majority of individual citizens, consumer protection organisations and academics strongly argued against any further (over)regulation of IPR infringements, especially in the context of the online world. Filtering of content and monitoring traffic on the internet were perceived as threats to fundamental rights or even censorship and therefore clearly rejected,” the European Commission writes.

In addition, the majority of the respondents argue that the entertainment industry itself is one of the causes of piracy, due to the lacking availability of legal content.

“Many stakeholders who opposed amending the current IPR Enforcement Directive, including ISPs, telecommunication operators and a majority of individual contributors, viewed the lack of available and attractive licit offer as one of the main causes for online piracy. They considered that increasing such service offers would constitute a feasible alternative to imposing more detailed enforcement measures.”

Most citizens go even further and call for legalizing file-sharing entirely, as it helps the free exchange of information.

“In their contributions, most individual citizens called for removing copyright protection against file-sharing, arguing that the free exchange of information would help spread culture as well as increase creativity without having detrimental effect on industry and society as a whole; such free exchange should therefore be supported rather than considered as infringing copyright law,” the European Commission writes.

From reading the responses it is clear that the majority has serious doubts about the anti-piracy measures that are introduced by IPRED. However, as we’ve seen time and time again in the past, this is by no means a guarantee that the lawmakers will listen.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof and one of the most outspoken opponents of IPRED, quickly announced that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers.

Although IPRED should’ve made it easier to track down file-sharers, there is nothing in Sweden’s Electronic Communications Law that dictates that ISPs have to store information about the IP addresses they allocate to their customers. To that end, Bahnhof stopped storing user data. No matter how many requests they received from copyright holders, there would be no data to hand over.

Later Bahnhof was joined by Tele2, with CEO Niclas Palmstierna announcing that his company would also stop storing IP address information. Through an increasing number of ISPs, IPRED had effectively been neutralized.

While Swedish ISPs clearly felt they had little choice but to protect the privacy of their customers against civil action related to petty file-sharing, it seems that their response to IPRED has generated an unwanted side-effect.

Anders Ahlqvist, chief of the National IT crime unit says that due to a lack of customer logging data at ISPs, it is becoming harder for the police to track down criminals carrying out serious crimes.

“It is a major concern, for example, when minors are exploited for sexual purposes via the Internet but we can not trace the perpetrators because logging information is missing,” says Ahlqvist.

Taking IPRED out of the equation is not an option, though. It appears there will be a new push to introduce a data-retention directive which will close the loophole and force ISPs to store customer IP address data in future, an eventuality predicted by IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky back in April 2009.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The entertainment industries, who were hugely in favor of the new law, said it would lead to decreases in illegal file-sharing, boost online availability of media and encourage citizens to spend money legitimately in official online stores.

Critics said that IPRED would boost file-sharing overall, increase usage of alternative methods to obtain unofficial media, would lead to people taking measures to cover their tracks online and prove to be ineffective.

According to a multitude of sources, IPRED has done the impossible. It has both increased and decreased file-sharing, increased availability of both legal and illegal material online while more money is being spent than ever before – not only on authorized media but bandwidth and VPNs too.

It hasn’t always been good news though. Suppliers of Internet bandwidth saw their business torn apart this time last year when 30% of their market disappeared overnight as casual file-sharers panicked about being locked up in jail forever for using The Pirate Bay. Luckily ISPs survived the year and their trade soon bounced back and on to record levels.

As 2009 progressed, for many Swedish file-sharers the fears mounted in the background. Would they be first to receive a scary letter in the mail? Would their life be ruined for sharing unauthorized material? Would the music and movie industries go on the rampage with the hundreds of IPRED cases the Swedish Government had predicted?

Hardly. Sure, a few book publishers got a bit uppity and tried to force ISP Ephone to hand over some customer information (that case is off to the Supreme Court) but so far, not one individual has been convicted of an IPRED-related offense.

Even the IFPI haven’t taken much advantage of their new powers having used them only once to go after a single file-sharer, an individual who may be simply warned once IFPI know his or her identity.

Nevertheless, IPRED is still doing its magic and being all things to all men.

Research by the Cyber Norms sociological research project showed that just before IPRED was introduced, 22% of respondents didn’t download illegally. By September 2009 that had jumped to 39%.

Yet one month later, Bonver, a company providing bricks and mortar stores with DVD movies, said that since the introduction of IPRED, rental had increased by a 40% with online movie downloads up 115%.

And all this while record numbers of Swedes turned to services to make them anonymous on the Internet. But what are they doing on their secret connections? That’s the thing…..no-one really knows anymore, but considering the music industry’s next announcement, it seemed doubtful it was for file-sharing.

In January 2010, IFPI announced that music sales were up 10.2% in 2009, which represented the first increase in revenue since 2000. IFPI chairman Ludvig Werner put this success down to better online availability and, of course, the introduction of IPRED.

But no sooner had the champagne been cracked open, a new study by independent consultancy firm MediaVision revealed that the accessing of illicit material online was actually on the increase.

But don’t despair. Even Kjell Bohlund of the Swedish Publishers’ Association is happy today, as he notes that the illegal file sharing of books has declined in favor of legal sales.

So all this leads to conclude that as of today, April 1st 2010, IPRED must surely be the greatest piece of anti-piracy legislation ever.

Not only does it allow the music, movie and book industries to increase revenue and improve online availability of authorized material, it also reduces piracy and allows it flourish at the same time. File-sharers are being left alone to do their thing while spending more money than they have done in a decade, while VPN suppliers wonder how they’re going to spend all their money.

But the greatest winners are those that commission surveys – spare a thought for them as they sip champagne on their yachts.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Several months later in November 2009, TorrentFreak looked at some Netnod data which seemed to indicate that not only had Swedish traffic levels returned to pre-IPRED levels, but actually surpassed them.

Traffic levels naturally increase year-on-year anyway, so it was difficult to be certain that that this boost was related to recovering levels of online piracy. However, new research just published by a consultancy firm seems to suggest that accessing illicit material online is indeed on the increase.

Mediavision bills itself an independent consultancy firm specializing in analyzing consumer behavior within the sphere of digital media. Its clients include media groups, TV channels, advertisers and production companies.

In its just published 2009 fourth quarter report, the company reveals that it detected an increase in the downloading of TV shows during the autumn of that year. In the 15 to 74 year-old bracket, 1.4 million Internet users engaged in that activity.

In the 15 to 24 year old group, 0.5 million used illicit streaming services to access both movies and TV shows, a method which Mediavision believes is becoming more sought after. 20% of the respondents in this age group admitted using them.

The company further says that 60% of 15 to 24 year-olds are estimated to have consumed illicit media online via various means in the fourth quarter of 2009, versus 40% of the 15 to 74 year-olds. This figure is the same as that reported by Mediavision before IPRED was introduced.

Overall, the company says it believes that the accessing of illicit movies and TV shows via the web has recovered at least to pre-IPRED levels, maybe slightly higher.

Jens Heron at Mediavision says that the piracy situation with TV shows would improve if foreign TV shows and other international became more readily available, at a time and place of the consumers’ choosing.

“Our analysis shows that consumers increasingly want to decide for themselves when to watch and from which screen. Unfortunately, many have become adept at circumventing the IPRED legislation. The way to remedy this, in addition to legislation, is, of course, by offering great legal alternatives,” he added.

Indeed, as earlier reported, around 10% of Swedes aged between 15 and 25 are taking measures to neutralize IPRED, with as many as 500,000 others in the country following suit. Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law in Lund, estimated that 6 to 7 percent of all Swedes could now be hiding themselves online.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

File-sharers on the other hand haven’t been sitting still either, as many have chosen to negate these initiatives by going anonymous.

Users of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks have increasingly turned to solutions that hide their identities from the outside world, rendering these new anti-piracy initiatives useless. The IPREDator service from the founders of The Pirate Bay opened up to the public this week, and is undoubtedly the most talked about newcomer in this business.

With a beta launch coinciding with the introduction of the controversial IPRED law in Sweden, the service promised to offer users an anonymous connection to the Internet. IPRED gave the copyright holders increased power to track down pirates, and with the launch of IPREDator the creators neutralized this new ‘threat’.

Much like many other comparable VPN services, Ipredator allows users to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. The interest in services like this is booming. In Sweden alone, an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are already hiding their identities online, and that number is expected to rapidly grow in the new year.

Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it’s not really anything we haven’t seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider.

That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform.

And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

While Ipredator owes its name to the IPRED legislation, the team behind it is also working to crush the Swedish wiretapping law (FRA) that was introduced earlier. Sunde explained in a recent writeup how they are planning to not only encrypt the connection between individual users and the VPN, but also the entire stream of outgoing data from the VPN until it has passed Sweden’s borders.

This will make it practically impossible for the Government to decrypt the data and find out what’s being sent. “The only thing they can do is to make it illegal to encrypt,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“People don’t understand why I want to encrypt the traffic, since they’re already hidden when they connect to our system. But they must understand that the same traffic can be found unencrypted, traveling across borders again,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. “Also, using a VPN outside of Sweden is bad for Swedes, since it will raise a suspicion flag at FRA,” he added.

Although these wiretap-busting plans haven’t been implemented yet, Ipredator does already offer a secure VPN connection. The service guarantees that anti-piracy outfits or even your ISP will be unable to record or spy on your BitTorrent downloads. Ipredator has just opened its doors to the public for those who did make the beta and are interested in giving it a try.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

They asked the Södertörn District Court to demand that TeliaSonera give up the information because SweTorrents was infringing on their copyrights. The application was made under the IPRED legislation introduced earlier that year, which was put in place to make it easier for copyright holders to track down and identify potential copyright infringers.

In December, the Court ruled in favor of the movie companies and ordered TeliaSonera to hand over the requested information to Antipiratbyrån. Claiming that the ruling violates the privacy of one of its customers, the ISP decided to appeal the decision.

In its appeal, the ISP argues that IPRED is in direct violation of the EU’s data retention directive, under which the privacy of the SweTorrents owner would be protected. According to TeliaSonera’s lawyer, the directive applies to this case even though it hasn’t yet been implemented by the Swedish government.

“The protection of privacy contained in the directive prevents the application of the Swedish IPRED law in this case,” TeliaSonera’s lawyer Patrick Hiselius said in a comment.

TeliaSonera further notes that in its ruling the District Court speaks of “the material that is uploaded on the website,” even though there is no copyright material on SweTorrents, only torrent links. Therefore, it appears that the Court’s ruling is “based on faulty technical knowledge,” according to the ISP.

If TeliaSonera’s appeal is successful, the new IPRED law will be crushed, which would be a huge setback for the anti-piracy outfits that lobbied long and hard to get it passed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, months and months went by without any attempt by music industry group IFPI to gain the personal details of an alleged file-sharer. Then in September, IFPI chief executive Lars Gustafsson said that the group were simply biding their time, and offered assurances that IFPI cases would appear in the months that followed.

Now, months later in December, the wait is over.

Today IFPI submitted evidence of alleged file-sharing to the Stockholm District Court, asking it to force an ISP to hand over the details of an individual behind a single IP address.

“We believe that all parts of the music industry feel best served by a combination of good legal services and good legislation. IPRED is a law with good privacy protection for citizens, but of course we will use it to protect our members’ rights,” said Ludvig Werner, Chairman of IFPI Sweden, in a statement.

However, before panic sets in among Sweden’s file-sharers, the details of the request should be considered. Among other things, IPRED aims to increase penalties and ultimately criminalize large scale infringement, so it’s interesting that IFPI have chosen their first target carefully.

Rather than go after a BitTorrent user, where it becomes very difficult to prove that one user is sharing lots and lots of music at once in order to be categorized as a large-scale infringer, IFPI has targeted the user of a Direct Connect hub instead. In basic terms, Direct Connect has a ‘shared folder’ type structure, where users are likely to share their whole music collections at once, not single albums as is common with BitTorrent.

IFPI says that it has not decided what it will do once it identifies the individual. It may go for a lawsuit, or instead chose to issue a warning.

Last week, the Stockholm District court ruled on another IPRED case, ordering ISP TeliaSonera to hand over the identity of the Swetorrents BitTorrent tracker operator to anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, which is working on behalf of four movie studios.

This request by IFPI is the first brought under IPRED by the music industry, and the third overall.

Update: Telia has announced that it will appeal the decision.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.