Torrent Site Uploader Ordered to Pay $652,000 For Sharing One Movie

[Ernesto]

In 2011, popular private BitTorrent tracker Swebits announced it would close down, just a week after one of its users was arrested.

The then 25-year-old was a moderator and uploader and between April 2008 and November 2011 allegedly obtained huge quantities of content from the warez scene and shared the titles with the site’s users.

The investigation, carried out by anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran (now Rights Alliance), involved the uploading of 518 movies and TV shows. The case concluded in the Västmanlands District Court last month.

Rightsholders dubbed the man Sweden’s “worst ever” individual movie pirate and for that the prosecution demanded at least one year in jail.

The district court has now handed down its verdict and while an immediate custodial sentence is off the table, the damages award is huge by any standards.

This morning the court ordered the now 28-year-old to pay $652,000 in damages for the unauthorized distribution of just one of the movies in the case. For the other 517 the man was handed a suspended jail sentence and ordered to complete 160 hours of community service.

In comments to TorrentFreak, Rights Alliance lawyer Henrik Pontén says that the damages award is the largest ever for a Swedish movie.

“[The $652,000] refers to compensation and is equal to what the man would have paid if he had bought a license to distribute the movie for free downloads,” Pontén explains.

“The man also has to pay damages for other losses such as disturbing the market and goodwill losses. This shows what damages are caused to the creators and rights holders by the illegal file-sharing of one movie.”

Needless to say the Pirate Party are outraged by the decision, which exceeds the $150,000 per title statutory damages possible in the United States, a territory infamous for its tough infringement penalties.

“To receive such a harsh penalty for doing something carried out by millions of Swedes shows how outdated our legislation is. The only way forward is a radical reform of copyright law that allows for the sharing of culture,” says Gustav Nipe, chairman of the Young Pirates.

But before any overhaul can take place, Rights Alliance have their eyes on other targets.

“In the future a number of criminal cases are up for trial and damages will be brought forward for one or several movies,” Pontén concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

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[Rick]

Copyright Monopoly: A Swedish man has been sentenced to the highest damages ever in Sweden, and possibly in the entire world, for sharing culture: 4.3 million SEK (€475,000) for sharing ONE movie. The movie Beck – Buried Alive, a typical Swedish taxpayer-subsidized B-movie, was uploaded to the culture-sharing hub Swebits. This represents a heavy escalation in the war over sharing knowledge and culture.

The mind-boggling verdict was announced today in the district court of Sala, a rural Swedish municipality so small it barely qualifies for a dot on the map. The verdict is said to be based on something worse than the usual “lost-sale” fantasy calculations; it was reportedly based on the list price for buying the full monopoly distribution rights to the movie.

Apart from the utterly and unspeakably insane level of damages, it is remarkable how the taxpayers can pay for a movie and yet not have any rights to it in countries like Sweden. The copyright industry lobby organization, the Rights Alliance, is gloating openly in a press release:

“The high level of damages shows how creators and rightsholders are hurt by illegal file-sharing of a movie”, says Henrik Pontén, lawyer with the Rights Alliance. “We have a number of lawsuits lined up ahead where we will demand damages for one or more movies.”

To counter this lobby propaganda, the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party, the Ung Pirat (Young Pirate), is also quoted in Swedish media today:

“Such a harsh punishment for doing something that millions of other Swedish people are doing shows how outdated the legislation is”, says Gustav Nipe, chairman of Young Pirate. “The only road ahead is a radical reform of the copyright mess [Swedish wordplay: Upphovsgröten] to fully allow the sharing of culture.”

At the time of writing, it is unknown if the verdict will be appealed to somewhere less rural. In the meantime, the risk of being convicted for culture-sharing like this remains considerably less than being hit by lightning, mathematically speaking, despite the copyright industry lobby’s persistent attempts to give a false impression of the actual risk.

Madnesses like these are probably the best election campaign Pirate Parties around the world could possibly get. It’s sad beyond words for the victims of law it takes to wake the public opinion to what’s going on, though, and I’d much rather see the copyright industry killed before it ruins any further lives like today’s verdict.


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