On Sunday, June 8, the Swedish Left Party shot a blow to the corporate behemoth—voting in favor of a motion to legalize file sharing. Their proposal, if successful, will give all people of Sweden the right to upload or download copyrighted materials for their own personal use.

After an intense deliberation, the party concluded that file sharing can be positive and beneficial, as long as no one is making unauthorized money off of it. Their motion related the benefits of the dreaded “piracy” to those of a public library.

Since nobody would dare prosecute a child for reading a book he or she did not purchase, the same should apply to the Internet, the proposal's backers claimed. The motion went on to condemn those practices currently being employed against file sharers, such as invasive surveillance and “David vs. Goliath” style lawsuits.

While a bill like this would probably never pass in the U.S., it seems to have a good chance in Sweden. The Left Party currently holds 22 of the 349 seats in the Swedish Riksdag (parliament). That might not seem like much, but the next day, June 11, their numbers grew as the Swedish Centre Party, which holds 29 seats and four cabinet positions, joined their side.

The Centre Party is third in strength, only to the Moderate Party (97 seats) and the Social Democratic Party (130 seats). Their motion called for a much-needed update and improvement of copyright laws, to reflect today's zeitgeist, and not that of an almost extinct era and industry.

The music industry in Sweden is comparable to those of the U.S. and the U.K. In 2001, it ranked just 6^th in the world for record sales per capita. The same record companies we fear—Universal, Warner, Sony, EMI, Virgin etc.—all operate successfully in Sweden, and prosecute the same ways they do here. But with the way things are going in the Riksdag, they may suddenly find themselves on the defense.

In addition, The Pirate Bay, the major controversy in Sweden, may finally find itself free from scrutiny, as the Left Party's motion is in support of the P2P site. The party believes that the legal proceedings against the Bay reflect a larger threat on personal freedoms. Their way of combating that is to legalize file sharing. Since The Pirate Bay offers an endless amount of media for trade with other users, Sweden will be looking at much more than just free music.

- Kyle Timlin