File sharing has become even more politicized, following the Pirate Bay verdict, in which the four founders were sentenced to a year in prison and £2.4 million in damages. This is bad news for the convicted, but France 24 reports the consequences are just peachy for Piratpartiet, a Swedish political party whose goal is “a free internet in an open society.” In fact, after the verdict was read, the party’s membership list swelled to over 38,000 names, making it the fourth-largest party in Sweden.

Piratpartiet’s candidate for the European Union elections, Christian Engström, explained the party’s goals to France 24: “Our goal is to win at least one seat in the European Parliament. To this end, we need to collect some 100,000 signatures.”

Engström hopes to represent the interests of European artists on the larger Brussels stage because, as he says, “The industry has had 10 years to adapt and revamp its economic model, but this hasn’t happened.”

For more on Sweden’s Piratpartiet, click here.

Now that the Justice Department is stacked with ex-RIAA attorneys, laws like the one that recently went into effect in Sweden could be coming to the United States. IPRED, a law that forces Swedish internet service providers to give up the identities of those accused of sharing pirated files, only went into effect two days ago, but the country’s web traffic has already decreased by 33 percent.

Wired reports: “The entire identification process is expected to take about two weeks under the new system, giving copyright holders a much more direct way to bring legal action against heavy uploaders… Swedish Pirate Party vice president Christian Engstrom said he expects P2P traffic to rise again, once people figure out how to use secure settings and encryption to share files without revealing their IP addresses to copyright holders.”

Engstrom disagrees with the IPRED law, which is being enforced by agencies from Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom and the U.S. under the overzealously named initiative “Operation Carbonite.”

“Dealing with illegal file-sharing is a job for the police,” Engstrom said. “It is their job to enforce the law. Now we have given private corporations the legal right to go after our civilians. That’s not how Western democracies work.”

Tom Perelli, President Obama’s appointee to the associate attorney general position, has actually fought for a similar cause on behalf of the RIAA in the past. Let’s hope ISPs see the news of Sweden’s 33% dip in Internet traffic and fight against this law coming to the U.S.