Copyright Law

IFPI Uses Sweden?s IPRED Law to Target Music Pirates

By soulxtc

Music industry begins taking advantage of country’s controversial anti-piracy law, filing suit to force an ISP to identify a customer it accuses of illegal file-sharing.

It was back in April that Sweden passed IPRED, a controversial new law that allows copyright holders to seek a court order requiring ISPs to divulge the names of accused file-sharers, but it’s only just recently that the music industry has decided to actually use it.

For according to The Local, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has filed suit in a Stockholm district court in order to force an ISP to identify a customer it accuses of illegally sharing some 50 copyrighted songs of more than 10,000 he made available.

It says that it’s targeting only a single suspected file-sharer for now so that it can learn the ropes, but foresees suing as many as 100 or more at a time in the future.

?We want to take one at a time,” said Ludvig Werner, head of IFPI Sweden. “It?s a new law and we have to learn how to do this, what the courts want in terms of evidence to be sure that they?re not compromising anyone?s privacy.”

As usual the suspect was using the Direct Connect (DC) P2P network, the one responsible for nearly all of the accusations copyright holders make against suspected illegal file-sharers. It’s cut and dry 1:1 direct connect-style data transfer protocol is what makes it ideal for evidence at trial.

It’s much more complicated to accuse BitTorrent users, on the other hand, because oftentimes a user shares only a tiny portion of a song nor is there a way to entirely see what they’re sharing with others.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on December 07, 2009 (boomark / email).