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Internet traffic in Sweden has dropped by more than 33 yesterday, as new laws give copyright holders the right to force ISPs to supply them with their

The European Union Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) is the main basis for Sweden new IPRED Local Law, which says that ISPs can be forced to the copyright holders of personal data about their customers. On April 2, when the measure is officially in force, monitoring stations said that traffic in and out of the country declined from 120 Gbps to less than 80 Gbps. Statistically, this is a reduction of 33 percent, a drastic one for a country of over 9 million inhabitants.

It is estimated that about 8 percent of the population uses peer-to-peer (P2P) sites in the country, so it would stand to reason that the drastic reduction of traffic yesterday was caused by people who fear for their personal information reaches the hands of copyright holders, as could then prosecute them in court.

"Today is a very drastic reduction of traffic. But the experience of other countries shows that file sharing drops a day for a team is on, it begins to climb again. One of the reasons is that a few people weeks to find out how their security so that they can share files anonymously, "Vice-President of the Swedish Pirate Party, Christian Engström, told the BBC.

"We estimate that there are two million file sharing [computers] in Sweden, so even if they are prosecuted 1000 people for an example of them, a single user is still a very small risk," he said, despite the risk that caught the increased, there was not much to worry about them as P2P sharing.

"Before April 1, the only thing we can do about illegal file sharing has to refer to the police, who are reluctant to take. Now we're ready to go to court to force ISPs to information for users of an IP address. In two weeks, we know exactly who owns the IP. Since we cannot do something, ask him to stop, or sue him for damages. We will not do this for small offenders, it is only for the big fish, "President of the Swedish Publishers 'Association, Kjell Bohlund added the BBC.

There are other aspects of the legislation to consider, including the fact that privacy is not violated only by the police, but also by private companies. There is no telling what they would do with the data collected with the warrants that they are judges.

"The handling of the illegal file sharing is a task for the police. It is their job to enforce the law. Now we have private companies the right to go after our people. It is not how western democracies work. In one study, it’s about 80% of those who believed that we should not go for file-sharers. But ask them how they feel about taking money from the pockets of musicians, writers and artists and that number drops by a large amount. Ultimately, we the people the idea of sharing files," Engström closed.

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