TeliaSonera Fighting IPRED Up To The Swedish Supreme Court

from the privcy-rights-trump-your-business-model dept

Last year, of course, Sweden passed a strict "anti-piracy" law called IPRED, following a ton of pressure from the US entertainment industry (and US diplomats repeating debunked industry talking points). While some have declared the law a "success," because music sales went up last year, there's little evidence to suggest the law has been useful at all. The amount of unauthorized file sharing did drop initially, but quickly went back up and now is higher than it was before IPRED became law. If the goal was to stop unauthorized file sharing, it failed miserably. As for the increased money in the music industry? A lot of that is actually due to new offerings, such as Spotify.

Of course, many people pointed out that IPRED, beyond being unlikely to work, also created a whole bunch of unintended consequences and problems -- including a dangerous attack on the privacy rights of those in Sweden. And, remember, this is Europe, where privacy rights are an even bigger deal than in the US.

When the first attempts to use IPRED to get user info from ISPs were made, some ISPs refused to hand over the data, saying that IPRED violated the EU's privacy rules. So far, the courts have no agreed, but Swedisn ISP TeliaSonera is now taking the issue to the country's Supreme Court:
"The rules governing privacy and confidentiality have long existed in the rules that govern our industry and the IPRED law is brand new," says Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at TeliaSonera. "It is important that there is a principled review of the Code and the Anti-Piracy Agency's interests."
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Filed Under: copyright, ipred, privacy, sweden
Companies: teliasonera


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  1. identicon
    NAMELESS.ONE, 21 May 2010 @ 6:36pm

    HEY theres no free pot over here

    A) expose how the pirates do stuff
    B) make and distribute the number one way they do so
    C) get media to all yap off same.

    DO you think the advertising of it all helped you hollywood?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    NAMELESS.ONE, 21 May 2010 @ 7:34pm

    also i wonder if swedish police chiefs comments will get used in court

    ya know where he said adding all these people in the millions we cant find the "real bad" criminals

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Tor (profile), 22 May 2010 @ 4:19am

    Last year, of course, Sweden passed a strict "anti-piracy" law called IPRED, following a ton of pressure from the US entertainment industry (and US diplomats repeating debunked industry talking points).

    If I am to be a bit picky IPRED is not actually the name of the law, but rather this EU directive. The so called IPRED-law is simply a Swedish implementation of this directive. In practice this meant a couple of changes to the Swedish copyright law (and the law on electronic communication if I remember correctly)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2010 @ 8:26am

    Re:

    which in part is what makes the lawsuit sort of silly, because it attempts to say that an eu directive goes against the eu privacy policy, and they are trying to fight it out in a swedish court that can only rule on swedish law. mork mork mork!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Admiral patent, 22 May 2010 @ 11:05am

    Re:

    Ohhhh, thanks for clearing that up, I thought it was Apple's new military drone.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. icon
    sprearson81 (profile), 10 Jun 2012 @ 9:00am

    Apple have a military drone?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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