By Jemima Kiss: Sweden could be considered the world’s unofficial home of internet piracy largely thanks to the work of Pirate Bay, which claims to be the largest global tracker of BitTorrent files. That doesn’t mean that all those are illegal… but a study of P2P file sharing, reported by AP, in Sweden estimates that 38% of young males illegally share files online and the 16-24 year-old age group used it most intensively.

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Across the wider population of nine million people, the proportion is roughly one in ten. Sweden had 685,100 P2P file sharers in January, February and March this year based on a survey of just under 4,000 people. Half as many women use P2P networks as men, and Sweden has the second most intensive web use in Europe after Norway. All of this preempts a decision by the Swedish government to implement EU proposals on intellectual property rights enforcement that would track illegal file sharing activity and force ISPs to hand over details of offenders. That is due to come into effect on April 1.