The Swedish music industry clap their hands as record sales swell and illegal filesharing on the internet continues to dive due to a new harsh law.

The controversial new law on file-sharing, allowing record- and film companies to track down people suspected of illegal file share, that was introduced in April had an immediate effect.

As soon as the new law was set off, the internet traffic dropped between 40 and 50 percent, according to the infrastructure monitoring company Netnod. During the first day, the traffic dropped 30 percent.

The sudden drop in internet activity was the biggest since a raid against The Pirate Bay, the world's largest BitTorrent sharing site, three years ago.

Three and a half months later the internet traffic is still on the same lower level as when the law was introduced, daily Dagens Nyheter writes, suggesting that illegal file sharing activities have diminished.

Not surprisingly, the entertainment industry is happy about the new law and its effect on illegal downloading. New figures from the music industry shows that sales of records are up 14 percent during the first half year, a change of trends after several years of falling figures. Sale on the internet increased 57 percent, according to the record industry’s organization Ipfi.

“The law clearly signals that it’s not okay to download illegally that has resulted in several good services on the internet and that new players get a chance to compete on the legal market”, Lisa Cronstedt, spokesperson at Ifpi said to the newspaper. 

Björn Ulvaeus from Abba has called young people illegally downloading part of  "the lazy generation" and wondered why it was "so damn hard to understand" that musicians and copyright holders must get paid for their work and compositions. 

The new law gives the representatives of copyright holders the right to get the IP-address from internet operators to persons suspected of copyright violations. It’s based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, Ipred.

However, the battle is far from over. The founders of The Pirate Bay, that’s being sold to a small Swedish stock-listed company, has launched a new service called Ipredator that allows people to be totally anonymous when surfing the web. Ipredator and similar services might boost the illegal activities again as people won’t have to fear getting caught by the entertainment industry’s lackeys.