In what is reported as an apparent response to grumbling from Hollywood actors and lobbying groups, Sweden has written a new law that bans downloading of movies and music; the bill takes effect this summer. Now, uploading content to distribution servers is illegal, but downloading from those servers is not. That state of affairs is effectively how the U.S. file-sharing lawsuits have been operating, with the targets being primarily individuals with large share folder from which content is "uploaded"—copied by other users of file-sharing networks. BitTorrent, perhaps the most popular consumer media-sharing environment, forces the user to upload while downloading, obviating the traditional distinction.
