[Legogris]

Indeed. Antipiratbyrån (The Anti-Piracy Bureau) was a lobby organization representing copyright holders in films and computer games until 2011. They surveilled people, breaching privacy laws but got exempted in court because it was done for a good cause. Infiltrated a Swedish ISP, tracked down filesharers online and took them to court and influenced the political debate a lot.

I don't have any illusion of lobbying and diplomatic pressure having lessened since.

[acct1771]

> got exempted in court because it was done for a good cause.

Wow...as described here, your legal system sounds...useless.

[rotorblade]

It is very bad indeed.

1. The judge in the pirate bay case was a member of an organisation "Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt"/"The Swedish Organisation for Copyright" (my own translation), and it was decided not to be partial to the pirate bay case. See for example [0].

2. Even if there were diplomatic pressures on Sweden from the US (which there were [1], their actual impact is what is in question), it should be impossible for a minister to influence the police directly [2]. Which makes for the pirate bay take down to be a ridiculous coincidence.

3. Sweden allows lawyers with their own, so called, "intellectual property" interests to defend suspects of file-sharing. See for example [3] which do give credit for this lawyer doing a good job, but just in principle this seems absurd (imo). I hope he is not allowed to be the defence lawyer if it is his own material at least.

[0] (Swedish, summary in English) https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/3800...

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-us-pushed-sweden-to-take-do...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerstyre

[3] (Swedish) https://overklass.wordpress.com/tag/fildelning/