Dagens Nyheter has a quite interesting article about the Swedish Department of Justice has received a report from a one man committee where it’s suggested that ISP’s should either close down broadband subscription for an individual or be forced to pay the fine for copyright infraction.

According to an interview with Cecilia Renfors who wrote the document and quoted by Dagens Nyheter, this won’t lead to that Swedish ISP’s are forced to participate in the hunt for broadband customers who downloads music or films ; but if the ISP don’t act up on an indication from the copyright holder, they would then stand responsible and will be taken to court. This would then mean that local Swedish ISP can actually be taken to court on behalf of how their customers use their product? Does this mean that we will have future similar laws for:

• Car industry so that they can be charged if their cars has been used in a bank robbery?
• Telecom industry since their phone lines could be used to fraud or threaten people?

And finally; should a person actually be able to be pre-convicted without taken to court? File sharing itself isn’t illegal as long you share legal material. But there is a high risk that this suggestion would have negative impact on privacy.

Kim Haverblad

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Tomorrow is the big OOXML day since the international community will cast their vote in the ballot. As some of you already taken notice about is that the campaigns has been far from clean and Microsoft has really manage to gather loads of negative PR around in Europe.

Sweden will abstain to vote due to that The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) has declared its recent vote in favour of Microsoft Corp.’s Office Open XML format invalid. Swedish media has as well, for once, shown a greater interest for story than one might expect since one of Sweden’s largest newspaper, DN, posted an article about it as well.

This entire story involving SIS and as well Microsoft Sweden might be forgotten in couple of month by most Swedes. But for SIS the damage might be more severe than admitted at first. Quite a few organisations have raised an eyebrow or two due the bad handling of OOXML ballot here in Sweden. Sweden has for quite a few other countries been looked at as neutral and objective for this kind of questions. Sadly it has been proven that we are not even close to that vision. SIS as an organisation should stand out as a quality actor and they have just showed that you can not count on them and they even admitted to that the OOXML voting process is normal procedure!

Kim Haverblad

Note: There are few more lines posted about this topic at Dagens Nyheter, OS2 World.Com, IDG.se and Computer World.

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