Police Piracy Petard

The Swedish police, which has taken a hardline against online piracy, is now accused of copyright infringement for copying and using thousands of images from the Internet without permission.

According to an article in the local daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) [Google translation], the Swedish police now get to experience for themselves what the anti-copyright activists mean.

It seems that authorities have been building a database to assist investigators in matching crime scene footprints to specific types of shoes.

So far this database contains about 2,500 shoe pictures, which were apparently copied without asking for permission from various websites.

"We have previously helped the police in Sweden and abroad to identify shoes, and we are happy to continue.

"But it upsets us that they methodically and arbitrarily taken what we think are a lot of our pictures," Frederick Juto, chairman of a large online footwear store called BRANDOS, commented. [approximate translation]

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