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FILE-SHARING

‘Streaming overtakes file sharing’: report

Although file sharing over the internet continues to grow in Sweden it is becoming dwarfed by online streaming of TV shows and films, according to a new report by the internet company Cisco.

Published: 13 February 2010 12:35 CET

In the wake of the Pirate Bay court case in Sweden last year, which saw the conviction of the founders of the file sharing website, there was a sharp drop in the numbers of Swedes sharing films and music online.

But with increasingly faster broadband internet, more are now turning to services which offer streaming video, and eliminate the need for users to download copyrighted files and run the risk of prosecution.

“We calculate that file sharing will become less important, even though the actual numbers doing it will still increase,” Henrik Bergqvist, technical manager at Cisco Sweden told news agency TT.

Inspired by the music service Spotify and the video streaming site Voddler, a new service, Video Bay, by Sweden’s most well known file sharing advocates – the founders of the Pirate Bay – will be unveiled in the coming months. Streaming services are not illegal to watch under Swedish law but are illegal to upload.

While file sharing is expected to continue to grow at about 80 per cent per year in the coming years, Cisco predicts that it will be overtaken by online streaming which is expected to grow at about 130 per cent annually.

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PIRATE BAY

Sweden now owns Pirate Bay domain names

The Swedish state became the unlikely new owner of two domain names used by The Pirate Bay after a court ruling on Tuesday.

Published: 19 May 2015 14:31 CEST
Sweden now owns Pirate Bay domain names
The Swedish state now owns two Pirate Bay domain names. Photo: Vilhelm Stokstad/TT

In its ruling the Stockholm district court awarded Sweden the domain names piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se. 

The case marked the first time a Swedish prosecutor had asked for a web address to be wiped off the face of the internet, Dagens Nyheter reports. 

“A domain name assists a website. If the site is used for criminal purposes the domain name is a criminal instrument,” prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told the Swedish daily earlier this year. 

Sweden’s Internet Infrastructure Foundation, which controls the Swedish top level domain .se, opposed the prosecutor’s move to prohibit any future use of the two Pirate Bay addresses.

The court agreed that the foundation had not done anything wrong and conceded that it could not force the group to block certain domain names, Dagens Nyheter reports. But by awarding the addresses to the Swedish state the court effectively ensured that they will not be sold on to another owner. 

The file-sharing service was temporarily knocked off line in December after police seized servers hosted at a data centre in a nuclear-proof bunker deep in a mountain outside Stockholm.

But seven weeks later the resilient file-sharing behemoth was back on its feet and Tuesday’s ruling is unlikely to knock it off balance for long, as the court cannot prevent The Pirate Bay from continuing to run sites on other domains.

The Pirate Bay, which grew into an international phenomenon after it was founded in Sweden in 2003, allows users to dodge copyright fees and share music, film and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site – resulting in huge losses for music and movie makers.

In 2009 four Swedes connected with The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement by a Swedish court. 

They were each give one-year jail terms and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in compensation.