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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)."
How does fining someone many times their net worth accomplish anything?
Someone could fine me $5 million or $50 million dollars. It doesn't change the fact that I can't ever hope to pay it.
Are these numbers just meant to scare people, or do they *actually try* to collect many times a person's net worth from them?
I'm surprised at this coming from a Scandinavian country. It sounds much more like something you'd hear from a U.S. court. Common sense tells me they'd have tacked on the extra fine either way though: low quality = damage to reputation, high quality = damage to profits. There was no winning move in that sense.
How does fining someone many times their net worth accomplish anything?
It's a death penalty.
This case was in Sweden, but at least in the U.S. as long as media companies can buy extensions of copyright terms from politicians and prevent anything from ever becoming public domain, I don't feel too bad about their work being stolen. They have, in effect, stolen untold millions in works that should have been free for all to distribute, extend and enjoy. Copyright was not meant to extend until Disney gets tired of buying updates to the law.
"snow white" is still public domain. so is pinnochio. What isn't public domain are the seven dwarfs happy through dopey, jimminey cricket, and others. These are new characters that Disney created. you're free to make your own pinnochio XXX or whatever you want to do.
Note that the original snow white had seven dwarfs, but they didn't have names. you can't use the Disney names.
So does the value of the movie approach infinity as the resolution approaches zero?
FWIW the film in question (Beck - Levande begravd) was a total fiasco at the box office... The fine (if ever paid) would likely provide a higher income than the film netted at the cinema.