The Swedish ministers of Justice and Culture made a statement in a Swedish newspaper editorial late last week calling for the government to establish a legal framework that would enable courts to order ISPs to reveal the IP addresses of file-sharers. The Swedish Pirate Party issued a response on its own web site, condemning the government for making a "declaration of war against an entire young generation of voters... on behalf of the American film and record companies."

The Swedish government has recently expressed concern about the growing perception that the country is a safe haven for peer-to-peer file-sharing. This proposal provides insight into the sort of legislation that the government intends to craft in its effort to address the issue. The government has also recently launched a legal assault against The Pirate Bay, a widely-known Swedish BitTorrent tracker that has fearlessly continued to operate despite prior raids and countless threats.

The proposal offered by the Swedish ministers is favored by ISPs because it shifts some of the burden of copyright enforcement on the content industry rather than placing all of it on telecommunications companies. That characteristic distinguishes the proposal from one published recently by an appeals court judge who suggested that ISPs should be required to terminate service for users who repeatedly obtain copyrighted material from file-sharing networks without authorization.

According to Swedish news site The Local, support for disclosure of IP addresses represents a significant reversal for the Center Party, which had previously vowed to fight against anti-piracy proposals that erode privacy. This debate in Sweden comes at the same time that the European Parliament is evaluating the possibility of classifying IP addresses as personal information and extending legal protection to IP addresses accordingly.

As we have noted in the past, proving an association between an IP address and a person isn't easy or even possible in many cases. This raises many questions about the validity of cases that are brought on the basis of IP addresses alone without further evidence.

Noting that the content industry has generally used the threat of costly litigation to win out-of-court settlements from accused file-sharers in the United States after obtaining identifying information from ISPs, the Pirate Party accuses the film and recording companies of acting like the mafia and cautions lawmakers against opening the door for those kinds of practices in Sweden.

"This proposal means that film and record companies' representatives will get subscriber information on suspected file-sharers through a simple request to the courts," the Pirate Party said in its response to the ministers' proposal. "They can threaten suspects with a ruinous level of damages in order to force them to 'voluntarily' pay a settlement... The government has a choice: either it can accept that file sharing is a technological and historical fact, or it can continue to dismantle democracy and the rule of law to protect an out-of-date industry."

The Swedish government has already demonstrated its resolve with the vast scope of its assault on The Pirate Bay. It looks like legislative changes that accommodate litigation against filesharers is the next item on the Swedish government's agenda.

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