Court Rejects Massive Torrent Damages Claim, Admin Avoids Jail (torrentfreak.com)

A former torrent site operator has largely avoided the goals of an aggressive movie industry prosecution in Sweden. Against a backdrop of demands for years in prison and millions in damages, the 25-year-old owner of private tracker SwePiracy was handed 100 hours community service and told to pay $194,000, TorrentFreak reported Tuesday. The torrent website in question is SwePiracy, and it has existed since 2006. Naturally, it became the target of many anti-piracy outfits. In 2012, the website was shut down in a coordinated effort with anti-piracy group Antipiratbyran. The report adds: Earlier this year its now 25-year-old operator appeared in court to answer charges relating to the unlawful distribution of a sample 27 movies between March 2011 and February 2012. The prosecution demanded several years in prison and nearly $3 million (25k kronor) in damages. During the trial last month, SwePiracy defense lawyer Per E. Samuelsson, who also represents Julian Assange and previously took part in The Pirate Bay trial, said the claims against his client were the most unreasonable he'd seen in his 35 years as a lawyer. After deliberating for three weeks, the Norrkoping District Court handed down its decision today. SwePiracy's former operator was found guilty of copyright infringement but it appears the prosecution's demands for extremely harsh punishment were largely dismissed. The torrent site operator avoided a lengthy jail sentence and was sentenced to probation and 100 hours community service instead.

Comments

Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperlinking is not a crime.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is. That is why people are going to jail. Wrong is a subjective term, and he who has the gold makes the rules.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding and exploiting Loophole to achieve a crime with out actually breaking the law is a risk proposition.
The slightest miscalculation can case you to cross the line.

Ask for Money Legal.
Having a Gun Legal.
Asking for Money with the Gun, Armed Robbery

Re:Still wrong

[aliquis]

Yeah I don't see how he was infringing copyright by running the site no matter what it was called.

Helping possibly but doing it? Not unless he actually shared the videos.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

<ObPedantic>The word you're looking for is "illegal". Hyperlinking is illegal. Gold buys laws, which makes things illegal.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with right or wrong.

Being black in the front of a city bus in Selma, Alabama, in 1955 was illegal, but it was not wrong.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: Montgomery, AL. Probably also in Selma, but not historically relevant.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get how corruption works over historical time, basically big media in most western states successfully conquered public domain and their big idea is to take away our right to own anything. Corporations of the world use United states as a testbed to policies they want to impose on the world, given the stupidity and gullibility of the american public.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

From a free speech perspective, a link is just a pointer. It's the digital equivalent of a guy with a sign saying "there's a cop over here", or "there's a copy of a movie over there".

Re:Still wrong

[nbannerman]

So logically, he was what we'd call (here in the UK at least) an accessory? He is (and this is stretching the definition of theft a tad...) the getaway driver for a bank robber? The reason for asking being that being an accessory to a crime is still a crime, if you're facilitating without actually 'doing'.

Re:Still wrong

[zlives]

he is more like the getaway car manufacturer or the contractor that made the road.
or in a more us example the gun manufacturer. lets see when was the last time any of them were held accountable!!

Re:Still wrong

[Megol]

Comparing racist laws with knowingly and willingly providing a service to make copyright infringement? Ludicrous.

The reason it is considered illegal is the same reason knowingly and willingly providing a service for any illegal activity is considered illegal, nothing strange about it. If I'd set up a bar with the intention to profit indirectly from drug dealing and prostitution it would still be illegal even though I didn't directly earn money from those activities. The same applies to this situation.

Re: Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

He's more the whiteboard manufacturer, who's whiteboard was used by person-2 who wrote down where to find person-3 who is giving away one part of a gun that person-4 used in a fully built gun that was used during a crime.

Naturally he deserves prison time, not unlike you deserve prison time for typing his name into your posting and thus referencing him and all the people in the above chain of events ending with a crime four steps disconnected

Re: Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of dive bars in this country where the barman has a high likelihood of also being the pimp. Ignoring those there's plenty with regulars that nobody questions that the barman will never be held accountable for.

The problem isn't that it's a crime. The issue is that the punishment is out of scope with the crime. 3 million on someone who doesn't profit and will never make that much in their lifetime is, essentially, insane.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Asking for money while threatening someone with a weapon is armed robbery. Merely possessing a weapon while panhandling is not armed robbery.

Re:Still wrong

[Kkloe]

he said with the gun, that implies that means of getting said money was using the gun in some way

Re:Still wrong

[unrtst]

The reason it is considered illegal is the same reason knowingly and willingly providing a service for any illegal activity is considered illegal

I would argue that a link provides information, not a service.
The classified ads provide information, not illegal services.
The anarchist cookbook provides information, much of which serves only illegal purposes, but we protect that speech (at least where I'm from).

I do support going after those that are distributing the copyrighted content. However, if that content never even touches the defendants servers, I don't believe he should be held liable for those other peoples actions. In the same vein, I don't believe search engines should ever be forced to remove links (remove the source, and maybe force the search engine to update said link, which now has no content to quote).

Re:Still wrong

[unrtst]

You're giving him too much credit. If he made the car or gun, it would be like him making and distributing and profiting from the bittorrent client software.
He is more like a magazine ad for the gun show where someone bought a gun that was used in a crime.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright infringement is comparable to jay walking or driving five miles over the speed limit. The only difference is that certain groups want to treat it as being worse than murder.

60 years ago.....
Megol
Comparing slavery laws with laws that just give each race a place to sit on the bus. Ludicrous.

Re: Still wrong

[Megol]

Of course it is insane and of course copyright laws should be revised (IMHO - it isn't the opinion of everyone). However claiming indirectly making money on illegal things aren't illegal in themselves is wrong, going further and comparing willingly doing a thing that have repeatedly been judged as aiding an illegal activity (making the person doing it an accessory) with protesting racist laws is again ludicrous.

Also observe that he didn't get a $3M fine, I think the current judgement is still too harsh however we are still talking about someone that knowingly and willingly put himself in this situation. As he is 25 years old and not mentally he should be treated as an adult and adults have to take the consequences of their actions.

Re:Still wrong

[zlives]

that is an interesting pov. what happens if you take out a print ad with site addresses?

Re: Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the book "Year zero" for a good laugh about how our system works....

Re:Still wrong

[unrtst]

I suspect that would be similar to the decss tshirts, or the decss haiku, or the dramatic readings or songs: http://decss.zoy.org/
The copyleft.net decss tshirts did get sued, but I don't know what the outcome was. I though it come out in their favor, but that site is long gone now.

Re:Still wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

So I have a gun right? I'm open-carrying it, I'm not touching it, I'm not pointing it at you, and you don't know me. I'm not breaking the law.

Now give me $50. I'm not threatening you with my gun which may or may not be loaded. Where's my $50?

Re:Still wrong

[Megol]

If the anarchist cookbook provided a link that a user could click to make an illegal substance (it would have to be illegal for the comparison to work at all) then yes, it is comparable. But that isn't the case.

$3 million (25k kronor)

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be 25M Kronor - 25 MILLION.

Re:$3 million (25k kronor)

[frovingslosh]

I spotted that too and was about to post about it, although 25M doesn't really work with current exchange rates either. Just another example why being a Slashdot editor is such a great job, no physical labor and no mental labor. Slashdot. how can I get a job like that? I promise to not do any better and raise expectations.

Re:$3 million (25k kronor)

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are accepting job applications at Well Fargo currently, sounds like it might be the job for you.

Glad we still have some sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporation rips off millions of people = $100K fine, don't do it again.

One guy in a basement copies a movie = $100,000,000,000 KERBILLION SQUILLION fine, whole family goes to Guantanamo.

Self-serving

[Anonymous Coward]

SwePiracy defense lawyer...said the claims against his client were the most unreasonable he'd seen in his 35 years as a lawyer.

Gosh, even the guy who's paid to say that says it.

Re:Self-serving

[Anonymous Coward]

SwePiracy defense lawyer...said the claims against his client were the most unreasonable he'd seen in his 35 years as a lawyer.

Gosh, even the guy who's paid to say that says it.

That doesn't mean he's wrong.

Re:Self-serving

[Megol]

Nor that he's right. Should we agree that it is a worthless statement?

Re: Self-serving

[Anonymous Coward]

He is actually not paid to say that... The attorney here isbpaidbfor by the government and not the defendant..

I might be a bit thick

[youngone]

Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?

Except for the obvious. (Powerful Hollywood got the laws they paid for).

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it serves the public good.
Or it is supposed to like Patents. And trademarks.
Writing a Book or a song is time consuming but cheap to copy. To encourage these activities the copy-Right was created.
Copying Movies is cheap too. Making them is expensive. The same thing.
Hosting them Blaitant violation, you will be prosecuted. Storing links to then is an attempt to find a loophole in the law.

Remember like all parasites the more they are successful the sicker the host. So can't get rid of all the torrents, fine. But you must kill enough of them so that they still make movies.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[suutar]

Patent and trademark infringement are not criminal offenses either; they're civil cases.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Kjella]

Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense? Except for the obvious. (Powerful Hollywood got the laws they paid for).

Redress or punishment or a little of both. If my kid accidentally dents your car playing, I'm liable for damages but not guilty of a crime. If I steal your car and wreck it I'm liable for the damage and guilty of the theft. If I drive drunk and get pulled over I'm guilty of a DUI but not liable since there was no damage or victims. Most things you do on purpose are both, if I smashed your car with a baseball bat it's obviously no longer an accident. Civil law is mainly intended for disputes and disagreements, if you intentionally break the law then it's usually the criminal system's job to deal with that.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Megol]

Traditionally the power of authors are weak and the power of printers/distributors etc. are strong. Even after copyright as a concept was accepted into law printers still tended to take writings from misc. authors and print it without authorization and without compensation. That may have something to do with it...

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually those fuckers should pay ME for having to watch their propaganda "movies"!

Re:I might be a bit thick

[zlives]

was about to say the same, hence no one from google, samsung or apple in jail

Re: I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Having copyright protection on a work is not free however.
And these holders have not paid their bill. They are literally stealing, not unlike writing a bad check that you know will bounce is the crime of check fraud, not paying for your copyright protection is fraud.

You are correct though, these "rights holders" are parasites that steal the works of art that belong to the public, and should be thrown in prison for life for their crimes.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

The public has no interest in copyright because with a life plus next generation copyright, nobody who is currently living has any incentive whatsoever to participate. Copyrights should last 14 years, and given companies and individuals are producing derivative works, you can grant an extension every time the new work is published by the original author, AND registered with the library of congress. None of this exclusivity or transfer-ability of copyright nonsense either, no more Marking things and making courts guess.

That's the root issue here. Fix that, these torrent sites become huge stores of valuable information overnight, and we stop this rent-seeking behavior from creeping further into the publishing culture and ruining it for everyone. If the Mathematics books from the 60's were good enough, then we have publishers reprint and sell those, we don't have schools buying new books every 2 years because the answer sheets need to change. It's ridiculous.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?"

Because capitalism has successfully overcome rule of law, and has for a long time but most people are uninformed and unaware that capitalism is now free from the rule of law completely and reshaping the laws of countries to suit corporate power.

AKA corporations are attacking your right to own anything and undermining your civil rights as histroically been the case with the business community, most people are too distracted, indoctrinated and unaware.

Copyright extension act - over time

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

Protectionism for the rich and big business

Re:I might be a bit thick

[AmiMoJo]

In most places it's only a crime if it's done on a "commercial" scale. They apply that definition to torrent sites because they usually need advertising to pay for server costs, and occasionally make their owners some money.

A case in the UK fell apart because the guy was only taking donations and never spend any of the money on himself. Unfortunately the police wiped the server before they gave it back to him.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?

Except for the obvious. (Powerful Hollywood got the laws they paid for).

Most of these laws were made when it was difficult and expensive to make copies of a movie/album/whatever. To do it on any kind of scale, you'd have to be creating large numbers of physical objects that competed directly with the corporate product. It almost had to be a commercial counterfeiting enterprise, so the punishments were adjusted as appropriate.

Now that you can host a tracker without pirating anything yourself, share a file without impacting the original copy, do this without going out of your bedroom or any commercial intent whatsoever, it no longer makes sense. But, it years years/decades for the law to catch up, especially when there's some very rich people who want things to stay they were.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically, it's because the laws didn't keep up (and then got perverted on top of that, making peoples' perspective even further divorced from law).

It used to be that copyright was intended to serve the public good, and so people who violated it were working against the public good (i.e. against you and me), making everyone else's life worse.

Some people still did it anyway. Then some publishers lost sight of their business (the paying customers) and focused on the criminals. They decided to implement copy protection, because they thought copyright law wasn't enough; providing economic incentives for publishing required some extra vigilante justice.

This was an uneasy situation, because vigilante justice almost never serves most peoples' concept of justice. (For example, you might not have violated copyright or be trying to, and copy protection can still get in your way.) So the relationship between publisher and purchaser became more tense. Copyright violations increased, both out of simple necessity (DRM usually prevents many lawful uses) and also because copy protection undermines peoples' respect for copyright.

Then an enormous disaster happened: publishers noticed that American voters almost never hold their government accountable. They bribed dishonest congressmen for a law called DMCA which legitimized the vigilante justice. Once this happened, the relationship between publishers and purchasers became openly adversarial, and violating copyright on DRMed things was no longer viewed as a bad thing. If anything, violating copyright on DRM works serves the public good and we're close to the tipping point where you're viewed as an unethical bad guy who should be punished, if you're caught financially supporting those who sell that stuff. "If you're not pirating, you're the problem."

That's why it doesn't make sense to anyone now that copyright violation should be a crime. But it wasn't always that way; it's still a crime in law because the laws were created (as well as many aging peoples' impressions of the motivations for law) back when copyright was workable.

There's another dark side to all this, that you don't hear about much. Because DRM is so heavily involved in entertainment media, the public is (rightly) habitualized to violating the copyright on those works. Copyright violating is something everyone ought to be routinely doing. But do you check to make sure everything you pirate really isn't available without DRM? Probably not. People have started to forget the reason we all so-often violate copyright law: DRM. There are definitely innocent bystanders being hurt by this, too. We're probably pirating lots of things we don't need to be pirating.

At a minimum, to make copyright be able to work again, we should repeal DMCA. And perhaps we should make it a crime to traffic in DRM (though once DMCA is gone I'm not so sure that's necessary). Let's stop making "be a criminal" the right choice for everyone. Do that, and you can have meaningful laws again, to truly serve good purposes.

Re:I might be a bit thick

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?

No.

And billing fraud is not

[Okian Warrior]

Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?

For contrast, note that Comcast was fined $2.3 million for ripping off customers with fraudulent charges.

Comcast's statement on the fines reads:

[Comcast's statement] "...also alleged that the FCC "found no problematic policy or intentional wrongdoing, but just isolated errors or customer confusion." When pressed about that phrasing, Comcast representatives clarified that "there was no finding or admission of liability in this Consent Decree."

(Emphasis mine.)

As someone pointed out, Comcast recovers $2.3 million in revenue in about 15 minutes.

Our government is completely against the people, and for the companies. This has to stop, whether by election or armed revolt is, at the point, immaterial.

Re:And billing fraud is not

[orgelspieler]

And whom would your armed revolt be against? I'll give you a hint, a lot of disgruntled Americans work for corporations. You think they're going to take up arms against themselves?

How the fuck?

[Pig Hogger]

How can a 25 year old be expected to pay $194,000? Is he going to be a slave for the rest of his life?

Re:How the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can a 25 year old be expected to pay $194,000? Is he going to be a slave for the rest of his life?

popular file-sharing sites make tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. he can probably pay with cash :p

Re:How the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually worse than that: "damages was dramatically reduced from millions to ‘just’ $148,000, payable to movie outfit Nordisk Film. On top, the state confiscated $45,600 said to have been generated by SwePiracy."

So nope, the guy is very broke I imagine.

Re:How the fuck?

[Troed]

popular file-sharing sites make tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. he can probably pay with cash :p

Do you want to buy a bridge?

Re:How the fuck?

[cdrudge]

You don't. But it's a lot easier to pay off than a $3m fine that was asked for.

Full circle

[Anonymous Coward]

It time to fine hollywood and put those scumbags in jail for making shitty movies. Fixed that for you and you and you!!

wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

". If my kid accidentally dents your car playing, I'm liable for damages "
only if he/she MEANT to damage it

SWEDISH court rejects massive torrent damages ...

[Qbertino]

Important detail.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: $3 million (25k kronor) in damages.

[Anonymous Coward]

Typo in the summary its 25M SEK,

Even worse the 25M SEK claim is only for one small Swedish movie (rated 3.4 on imdb):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1609808/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

So he owned it since he was 15?

[gosand]

The owner is 25 years old and it has been operating since 2006?

I was mowing yards and doing odd jobs saving up for a car when I was 15.