Policy Observatory

The Stockholm District Court decided to order the seizure of two key domains owned by The Pirate Bay, however it is unlikely that the site's operation will disappear completely. The motivation for the seizure is that The Pirate Bay is an illegal operation, thus its domains are tools used by the site to infringe copyright.

While two of the domains (ThePirateBay.se - the site’s main domain and PirateBay.se - a lesser used alternative) will be will be put out of action, the District Court dismissed the prosecution’s case against Punkt.se, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain.

The Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden ruled that all drone cameras count as surveillance devices, and that they can now only be used to prevent crime or accidents. In a linked ruling, it decided that car- or bike-mounted cameras are legally fine.

The Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) has checked how Google handles the "right to be forgotten", i.e. the possibility to have search results deleted. The DPA concludes that if Google is required to delete the result of a search, it may also be necessary to delete the search result when searches are made from other countries outside of Sweden.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven confirmed at a press conference on Monday that his administration potentially exposed the personal information of millions of Sweden’s citizens, along with some of the nation's military secrets, have been exposed.

A 32 year old Swedish national has been convicted to a $27.000 fine and a year of probation after he was found guilty of copyright infringement for distributing subtitles of copyrighted movies. 

In April 2015, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad directed claims against Fredrik Neij (one of the creators of The Pirate Bay) in an effort to disrupt the operation of The Pirate Bay website in Sweden. Ingblad also filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the organisation responsible for Sweden’s .se top-level domain. Mr Ingblad argued that the domains ‘ThePirateBay.se’ and ‘PirateBay.se’ were used as “tools” to aid and abet copyright infringement and should therefore be seized by the Swedish state.

In December 2017 the Swedish Supreme Court confirmed that the two domains can indeed be seized by the state.