The political pirate movement keeps spreading, and Scandinavia is to be one if its solid international strongholds. The movement was initiated by Swedish pirates led by Rick Falkvinge in January 2006, and now two of Sweden's neighbours, Finland and Denmark, are getting their own Pirate Parties. The Finnish Piraattipuolue will be officially founded in the coming weekend at a meeting in Tampere, Finland. The Danish Computerworld magazine reports that the Danish Piratpartiet has already been founded. Both parties will have an agenda following closely that of the Swedish Piratpartiet. The next great political opportunity and challenge for the European pirate movement will be the EU Parliament election to be held in June 2009.

Finnish Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre (CIAPC) toughens its fear campaign against filesharers. CIAPC has now used the new Finnish copyright law from January 1st 2006 to close an internet connection because of suspected filesharing. It came as a surprise to even CIAPC itself that the closed connection did not belong to a private filesharer but instead to the Provincial Government of Åland. A government employee had seemingly used the connection to share music.

The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) has published the results of its large p2p study based on an online poll of over 6,000 participants. The results show that the new stricter Finnish copyright law enabled year 2006 (coined as Lex Karpela according to Tanja Karpela who was the Minister of Culture at the time) has had only a minimal effect on filesharers. Only 10% of P2P users reported that the new copyright law had at least somewhat decreased their P2P usage.