Swedish Man loses Filesharing Case But Sweden Wins The Filesharing Battle

[GhostShip]

An interesting development has occured folks and its likely to be of comfort to many filesharers in Sweden ( yes the home of the pirate bay  )

http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL1220452220070612

A Swedish court of appeals on Tuesday upheld the country's first conviction for sharing music files over the Internet without paying in what the recording industry hailed as a victory.

The Appellate Court backed a verdict by a lower court in October last year that saw 45-year-old Jimmy Sjostrom fined 20,000 Swedish crowns ($2,843) for infringing intellectual property rights by sharing four music files.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) hailed the conviction as a boost for intellectual property protection and said it could act as a deterrent

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Ok thats the brave face their putting on this, but heres the real win for filesharers

But the Pirate Party, a political group that wants Sweden to re-legalize file-sharing, also claimed the verdict as a success -- saying it meant Swedish police would have a hard time finding file-sharers since they could only access Internet records for a crime that carries a jail sentence.

"The verdict confirms that the penalty for file-sharing in Sweden today is a fine," it said in a statement.
"For trifling crimes such as file-sharing, they are instead obligated to uphold their customer's right to anonymity."

Thats right folks if there is no jail sentence to be had for an offence (and this case sets the precedence) then the Swedish police have stated they will not likely be bothering to take action against anyone as its classed as a waste of their time.  I must say the best bit about all of this is that its surely proof of how desperate for publicity the anti filesharing folks are that they can only find a single filesharer who is breaking the law in the whole of the country, what good citizens eh folks 

[Mick832]

The simple economic truth of Law Enforcement is that most Police Forces will not waste resources on a single P2P user, but rather go after someone who downloads, burns and sells large numbers of dodgy DVDs etc.