Swedish Supreme Court confirms that domain names constitute property that can be seized by the state

The saga behind the decision I am going to report on first started in April 2015, when prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad directed claims against Fredrik Neij (one of the creators of The Pirate Bay) in an effort to disrupt the operation of The Pirate Bay website in Sweden.Ingblad also filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the organisation responsible for Sweden’s .se top-level domain. Mr Ingblad argued that the domains ‘ThePirateBay.se’ and ‘PirateBay.se’ were used as “tools” to aid and abet copyright infringement and should therefore be seized by the Swedish state. Section 53 a § of the Swedish Copyright Act (SCA) states that property used or being used for crimes regulated in the SCA may be seized to prevent further crimes. The same applies to property that is intended for use as a tool in connection with such activities.The Stockholm District Court (2015) and the Court of Appeal (2016) had found that domain names must be viewed as a…

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