Sweden's new anti-piracy policy allows copyright holders to quickly obtain the identity of major pirates and prosecute them directly through the courts, without going through the police. And it's scared a lot of Swedes straight.


The drop was measured by Netnod, a Swedish web tracking firm, who found that traffic fell from 120GB/s to 80GB/s on the day the law went into effect.

Christian Engstrom, VP of Sweden's Pirate Party (love it) is not concerned, however. He told the BBC:

"Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic. But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again. . .One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that can share files anonymously," he added.


The law is catching a lot of flak for effectively letting corporations enforce anti-piracy code with lawsuits, rather than leaving them to the police to deal with offenders on a criminal basis. Copyright holders can no go straight to the uploader's ISP, get his IP address and identity, and sue him up good.

From the country that gave us the Pirate Bay, though, I'm sure someone will figure out a way to subvert this. [BBC]