Swedish file-sharers have previously been protected from police action, since any offenses they commit do not generally carry a prison sentence. Now, the government is considering new legislation which will give the police powers to go after regular file-sharers, even if their actions were previously only punishable by a fine.
Ung Pirat, the youth organization of the Swedish Pirate Party received over 1.3 million Krona from the Swedish government yesterday. The money – government funding to political youth organizations – was heavily criticized by anti-piracy lobbyists.
Things are looking really good for the Swedish Pirate Party. Running up to the 2009 European Parliament elections more than half of all Swedish men under 30 are considering voting for them. Thanks to the Internet, its membership has grown 50% during the last quarter, surpassing that of the well established Green Party.
PiratPartiet, the Swedish Pirate Party, has started its march on Brussels with a bang. The party hopes to make a strong showing in June at the European Parliament elections, and has been bolstered in its aims by comments in major Swedish newspapers, which have termed the party “a classic civil rights movement.”
In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.
Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and the most active pro-piracy lobbyists and politicians, is drafting a new law that would make it easier to go after individuals who share copyrighted files on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent. The new law, likely to be opposed by a large number of Swedes, will go into effect April 2009.
The Swedish news site Nyheter24 has been criticized for including a list of most downloaded TV-shows on their site, and linking directly to the torrent detail pages on The Pirate Bay. According to Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti Pirate Bureau, who led the Pirate Bay investigation, the news site is assisting copyright infringement.
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