Swedish Court of Appeal Cancels Historic Decision on File Sharing Case

On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal of Sweden overturned the decision of the lower court regarding the rules of sharing files and data, according to which one of the Internet providers was obliged to provide information about users to five publishers at once.

The aforementioned court verdict was the first such decision based on the so-called Swedish directive “on the enforcement of intellectual property rights”. This document came into force on April 1 and gave copyright holders the opportunity to solicit detailed information about users involved in file sharing from Internet providers, thus opening the way to legal proceedings with “violators”. Five publishers sued the Internet provider Ephone in order to obtain the IP address of the server where 27 audiobooks were stored, to which these publishers had rights.
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The Court of Appeal of Sweden, in its ruling, concluded that the plaintiffs did not prove that the server was freely available to ordinary Internet users.

The president of the court had to make a final decision on the case, since the opinions of the other 4 sitting judges were equally divided.

Earlier, in June, the lower court ordered by its decision Ephone to provide information on the person whose computer was detected by the IP address mentioned in the case.

Since the aforementioned directive came into force, the download volumes of illegal content have significantly decreased. Practice has shown that the amount of generated Internet traffic fell by 30-40 percent.

This law was positively perceived by the leaders of the music, gaming and video industry, while the Pirate Party, seeking to legalize the dissemination of data over the Internet and increase the level of network anonymity, criticized it.

Posted: Oct 13, 2009
Source: AFP
Translation: LMW