Stockholm - Swedish internet traffic dropped by a third on Wednesday, the first day a new file sharing law went into effect, reports said Thursday.

The new law, based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), allows courts to order internet operators to hand over details that identify suspected illegal file sharers.

The 30-per-cent drop was reported by Netnod, which operates internet exchanges in five Swedish cities.

"Most traffic on the internet is file sharing. Therefore there is no other explanation to this sizeable dip in traffic than the new IPRED law," lawyer Henrik Ponten of the Anti-Piracy Agency told the freely distributed newspaper Metro.

Ponten's agency was formed by Swedish film and computer game producers and distributors. It has recently been engaged in a court case against four men over operating the Pirate Bay website, an alleged hub for illegal file sharing.

In a related move, five Swedish audio book publishers filed a request at the district court in Solna outside Stockholm. The publishers said they wanted to find out who owned a specific IP address, which is the unique identifying number for each computer connected to the internet.

"We have identified an IP address from which an enormous amount of titles are distributed. In all several thousand different audio books, which is almost the complete Swedish audio book production," Kjell Bohlund, head of the Swedish Publishers' Association, told the online edition of daily Svenska Dagbladet. (dpa)