The Local reports:
Swedish broadband provider ePhone is not obligated to hand over customer information to five book publishers, according to a decision by the Svea Court of Appeal which overturns a lower court ruling.
The case, which ePhone initially lost in June in Solna District Court, is significant because it is the first to go to trial since the passage of a law designed to crack down on internet piracy in Sweden.
[…]
ePhone argued that the five audio book publishers who filed the lawsuit had not been able to prove that anyone other than users from Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Bureau (Antipiratbyrån) had accessed a server containing sound files for 27 titles which the publishers claimed had been made available for downloading by the general public.
The appeals court agreed with ePhone, finding that the book publishers failed to show that there was probable cause to believe copyright infringement had occurred.
In overturning the lower court’s ruling, the Svea Court of Appeal argued that the copyright protected material on the server, which was linked to an ePhone customer, had not been made available to the public or even to a select group of people.
Since users were required to log into the server and there had been no investigation to indicate that login information had been widely shared, the court concluded that the publishers had not convincingly shown that the audio books had been available to the public.
Read the full story in The Local. BetaNews also provides some commentary.