Swedish Man Fined $650,000 For Sharing 1 Movie, Charged Extra For Low Quality

An anonymous reader writes "A 28-year-old man in Sweden has been fined 4.3 million SEK (~650,000 USD) for uploading one movie. 300,000 SEK of that was added because of the upload's low technical quality (Google translation of Swedish original). The court ruled that the viewer watching the pirated version of the movie had a worse experience than people watching it legally, thereby causing damage to the movie's reputation (full judgement in Swedish)."

Comments

ONE movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the second paragraph of TFA:

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.

ONE Movie!?? C'mon Slashdot.

Try reading past the third paragraph

[alexhs]

[T]he 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.

Re:Try reading past the third paragraph

[alannon]

This entire thing really only makes sense if you take a look at it in terms of court costs. He was being prosecuted on 517 counts, which makes him, in my mind, much more than just a casual media pirate (as suggested by the summary). If the evidence was pretty much equally clear on each of the 517 movies, it probably saved a lot of court time and money to pin all of the substantial penalties on a single count and then suspend the rest of them. The downside for the court is that a huge amount of publicity it generated because of the "$650,000 for one movie" angle, whereas this might have caused less outrage if it had been a $1250 fine per movie, even if the total had been the same. If somebody else has another explanation as to why they would choose this bizarrely lopsided penalty, I'd like to hear it. Okay, scratch all of that. I read the related article, http://torrentfreak.com/largest-ever-bittorrent-tracker-movie-uploader-trial-concludes-131120/ and it says that only a single producer seeked damages. What an asshole, destroying someone's life for the sake of a 25 year old shitty horror movie.

Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number

[Assmasher]

Unfortunately you can have your home seized in a forfeiture if you default on paying back a judgement, so if the judgement is large enough, yes, you can lose your home.

Maybe all file sharers should incorporate into Subchapter S or LLCs ;)...

Re:Good

[Ragzouken]

don't be so sure about that - there are cases where something in the public domain has been recopyrighted and removed by changes to the law

Re:Good

[Desler]

A derivative of a public domain work can be copyrighted. Unless retroactively copyrighted by Congress, the original work is not.