Swedish Police follow German lead

Just a week after German police filed criminal charges against 3,500 alledged eDonkey users, the Swedes have followed suit in funding the fight against online copyright infringement.

"Swedish police raided 10 different locations in Sweden and seized servers in a massive crackdown on torrent site Piratebay.org...

Reports from a wide range of online Swedish news sources claim that up to 50 police officers were involved in the raids in Stockholm, Gothenburg and several other locations around the country...

Swedish Antipiracy Bureau’s spokesman Henrik Ponten - which represents the music and movie industry in Sweden - applauded the police for finally targeting large scale piracy organisations such as Piratebay.

The Antipiracy Bureau is allegedly also the organisation behind the police raids.

It is unclear if Piratebay has breached the Swedish copyright laws and the charges so far consist of crimes against copyright laws and aiding crimes against copyright laws. Usually, Swedish police would not have got involved in such a direct fashion when it comes to copyright crimes in Sweden due to the relatively low charges involved, which would only merit fines...

Judging from posts on several of the large Swedish newspaper forums, many people are outraged over the raid, not because the Piratebay was closed down, but because of the waste of taxpayers money and police time, when there are other more important crimes to solve."

Yet again music executives will be dancing with glee. There are not enough details to make a judgement call about this. If it is a large scale piracy operation, fair enough. If it's not then they should not be wasting their finite law enforcement resources.