Scandinavia seems to getting tougher with those sharing illegal music files on the web. Sweden last week passed a law banning the sharing of copyrighted material on the web without payment of royalties. Until now, it was legal in Sweden to download copyrighted movie and music files, but making them available for sharing was unlawful.

Earlier this year, a Swedish prosecutor had already charged a man who made a movie available for download from his computer, the first such case in the Nordic country.

In Sweden, the piracy problem is bigger than in any other country in Europe, experts claim. At least 500,000 people in Sweden - a country of nine million inhabitants - download and post illegal copies of films, claims the Swedish Anti-piracy Bureau. But then they would say that, wouldn't they?

An Oslo municipal court this week sentenced a 36-year-old man for running an illegal file sharing service, the first conviction of its type in Norway. The man had made a significant number of film and music files available for at least 300 people at a time, daily newspaper Aftenposten reports. Norwegian police discovered more than 60,000 pirated film and music files, some of which sat on his employer's server: the Norwegian telecom company NetCom. ®

Related stories

Spaniards stick sword in P2P website
Court rules for German ISPs in P2P identities case
UK court orders ISPs to unmask 33 filesharers