Swedish Internet provider to take filesharing case to supreme court
Telecom giant TeliaSonera said Thursday it would go to the Swedish supreme court in an attempt to get a ruling forcing it to provide film companies with the identities of people behind a filesharing website overturned.
"What we have done today is to announce to the public that we will appeal," Patrik Hiselius, the senior adviser of public affairs of the Swedish-Finnish firm told AFP, adding the company had until June 7 to submit its appeal.
A Swedish appeals court on Monday upheld a lower court's ruling forcing TeliaSonera to hand over to Svensk Filmindustri, a Swedish film production and distribution company, among others, the names and addresses of people behind the www.swetorrents.org website.
The appeals court said its ruling against TeliaSonera was based on Sweden's controversial "Ipred" law, which came into effect on April 1 last year and gives copyright holders the right to require service providers to reveal details of users who share files, paving the way for legal action.
TeliaSonera said it was taking the case to the supreme court in the name of customer privacy.
"For us it is very important to have the highest court look into the principle of balancing the new ("Ipred") legislation vis-a-vis our basic industry provisions regarding confidentiality of communication," Hiselius said.
"The legislation protecting confidentiality of communication and thus the privacy of our customers has been around for years and years and its very basic in our industry," he added.
Until the "Ipred" law was introduced, Sweden -- home to one of the world's most popular filesharing sites, The Pirate Bay -- had widely been considered a haven for illegal filesharing.
Swedish Internet users have significantly cut down on illegal downloading since the Ipred law came into effect. The practice was so widespread that overall Internet traffic dropped by up to 30 percent after the law came into force, according to Internet exchange point operator Netnod.
Ipred has been lauded by the music, film and video games industries but staunchly criticised by Sweden's Pirate Party, which wants to legalise Internet file sharing and beef up web privacy.
(c) 2010 AFP
