Since the news about the Swedish ISP Bahnhoff was published here I thought I’ll post a little update.
Reuters conclusions was false and I presume they wont go out to correct it now when the protocol from the police is published.
Not even the Swedish media, apart from “Inrernet World” magazine, has bothered to follow up on what a fiasko the raid was.
The files that was supposed to be present on the servers in question was never found. No software for distributing files and no logs confirming that the servers been used for spreading material was located either.
All in all it’s been an interesting week in Sweden though.
Filesharing is very widespread here and the attempts lately to crack down on P2P networks etc has taken some major blows.
The “Antipiratbyran” is the organisation set up by the film, software and games industries to harras people by sending letter to ISP’s about users suspected to be sharing material and now raiding the ISP’s themself.
Their wepage was hacked just after the Bahnoff raid by an organisation called “Arga Unga Hackers” (angry young hackers).
They had gotten access to the mail correspondance from the “antipiratbyran’s” server and publicised letters exposing informers with full name, social security code and address on the hacked website.
In the midst of all this the new “US harmonised” laws was passed making it criminal to not only share but to download material.
The swedish government tries to tone the law down the implication of the law and have been saying that it will not be used to hunt normal people, and it’s to get to the people earning “big money” on piracy.
With the amount of people with broadband connections the selling of pirated material is to my knowledge very small though.
And the previous law was for sure sufficient to deal with any individuals in the business of selling pirated material.
A prosecutor yesterday dismissed a piracy case due to that he viewed the gathering of IP addresses as incompatible with the laws prohibiting unauthorized gathering of personal information.
Now there is a big resistance brewing and organising, and there will be a lot of action defending the rights to download and share material in the coming months for sure.