Later that year the Court announced its decision in favor of the anti-piracy group and ordered TeliaSonera to hand over the personal details of the person alleged to be behind the SweTorrents tracker.

TeliaSonera launched an appeal against the decision but in May 2010 the Court of Appeal upheld the District Court’s ruling. Failure to comply with this decision would result in a 750,000 kronor ($109,000) fine. Nevertheless, TeliaSonera were not prepared to accept the decision and immediately appealed and took the case to the highest court in the land.

Sweden’s Supreme Court has now ruled that the final decision in the case lies with the European Court in Luxembourg, a decision that might take several years to arrive.

The root of the complexity in this case lies with Sweden’s IPRED legislation. Both Antipiratbyrån and the lower courts believe that ISPs have an obligation to hand over to rightsholders identities of customers implicated in copyright infringement cases.

On the other hand, TeliaSonera insists that all ISPs have a long-standing and fundamental obligation to protect customer privacy which precedes the introduction of IPRED, while noting conflicts between IPRED and the EU data retention directive which has not yet been implemented in Swedish law.

The introduction of IPRED was expected to make it easier to track down file-sharers, but thus far the opposite is true at some ISPs. Since there is nothing in the country’s Electronic Communications Law that instructs ISPs to store information about the IP addresses they allocate to their customers, some ISPs have stopped storing this data to protect the privacy of their customers.

The decision by the European Court in the SweTorrents case is likely to be some time coming, and in the meantime ISPs will be free to continue deleting data, at least until the data-retention directive ‘loophole’ is closed.

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

In December the Court announced its decision and said that the ISP must hand over the name and address of the SweTorrents operator to Antipiratbyrån. Not wishing to breach customer privacy, TeliaSonera launched an appeal.

Earlier this week the Court of Appeal upheld the earlier decision of the District Court. Failure to comply would result in a 750,000 kronor ($96,500) fine.

The company has until June 7th to submit an appeal, but made the decision to do so almost immediately.

The decision against TeliaSonera is based on the Court’s belief that under the IPRED legislation, the ISP must hand over customer details in file-sharing copyright cases. TeliaSonera, however, feels that it has a fundamental obligation to protect customer privacy which precedes IPRED.

“The rules governing privacy and confidentiality have long existed in the rules that govern our industry and the IPRED law is brand new,” says Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at TeliaSonera. “It is important that there is a principled review of the Code and the Anti-Piracy Agency’s interests.”

Another ISP, Portlane, is facing a similar set of problems. This week it was also ordered to hand over the details of a BitTorrent admin, this time at the OpenBitTorrent tracker. Portlane also has the chance to appeal, but has yet to announce whether it will do so.

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.