Swedish police cracks down on shared folder with 6000 songs

In the land of The Pirate Bay, it is not using torrents that file-sharers get into legal trouble in Sweden. Instead, Swedish police and prosecutors tend to target people who share a large quantity of files all at once using a shared folder.

Torrentfreak reports that last Friday, the Prosecutors Office in Stockholm, acting on a tip from IFPI, seized the computers of someone who they suspected illegally shared around 6000 songs.

The owner of the computer used Direct Connect to share media. Direct Connect is less accessible than torrent platforms, but users tend to share their entire collections with each other.

Creating a case based on a shared folder makes sense from a police perspective. Here are people who, willingly and knowingly, provide others the possibility to consume large amounts of content without permission. However, if part of a strategy aimed at discouraging file-sharing, it may be less successful as the file-sharing community using torrents, usenet or cyberlockers is much bigger than this particular way of infringing.