Swedish repercussions

Posted on | April 18, 2009 | No Comments

Following the announcement of the verdict in the trial against The Pirate Bay (the so-called ‘spectrial‘) yesterday, the web has been buzzing with reactions. For one, the Swedish Pirate Party gained more than 3,000 Swedish members in just 7 hours, with a huge amount of people from around the world asking whether they could join too. This makes the Pirate Party the fifth biggest party in Sweden, and their youth department soon to be the biggest in the country; according to a survey, more than half of the male Swedish population under 30 is considering putting their vote in the Pirate Party pool.

Slashdot is one of many sources writing about this – check out their entry.

The ‘spectrial‘ is not the only Swedish copyright-related issue being discussed right now. Also their newly imposed digital surveillance bill, the IPRED (The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive), effective of April 1, is causing heavy opposition (it basically gives authorities the right to tap into any digital communication crossing Swedish soil, airspace and web-channels). One example of the hard opposition is an act by Swedish internet provider, Bahnhof, which has started deleting it’s members’ identification information, in order to secure their privacy. With the IPRED act, these informations could be legally retrieved by the authorities, and as a result, Bahnhof sees no other alternative than deleting them. Read the Slash-dot piece.

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