Andre Yoskowitz
6 May 2008 16:18
This morning, a 31 year old man from Sweden was found guilty in Sweden's largest ever P2P case but escaped any jail time for his actions.
The man was initially accused of uploading 23,000 music tracks to the popular filesharing application Direct Connect but Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency’s (APB) "use of questionable investigative techniques forced the prosecutor to withdraw some of the charges", down to about 4500 tracks. The man was also accused of uploading 30 movies.
Instead of jail time, the man received a suspended sentence and a "heavy fine." The prosecutors were asking for jail time for the man, but the judge had this to say, “this is a task for the government, that by legislative means or in other ways take the necessary actions” to come to a solution to the problem.
More interestingly, the court even implied that the music industry needs to take some responsibility for the current situation they are in, where piracy is rampant, and many have little respect for copyright laws.
The fine however, is decently large and comes out to about 54670 kronor ($10,000 USD) including court fees he must pay back.
Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, commented on the trial:
“A consequence of the court having increased the sanctions in this case is that it will be easier to make ISPs give out information on IP addresses [in the future]. This of course affects the possibilities to act against these kinds of crimes.”
Morgan Gerdin, the defense lawyer, still feels her client was innocent. “The District Court hasn’t observed the technical evidence. It is not possible from that evidence to conclude that my client has been filesharing. He should have been found not guilty.”
Magnus Eriksson, spokesperson for Piratbyrån, sees the verdict as insignificant however and tells filesharers to continue their hobby without risking prosecution. “The outcome of the verdict is based on the amount of files shared by this person. With more modern filesharing software [BitTorrent], it isn’t possible to see all the files that one person is sharing.”