The Swede will pay $ 610,000 for downloading 1 movie to a torrent tracker, plus a fine for poor quality

    One of the distributions on the Swedish torrent tracker Swebits was very expensive for the moderator and site administrator. The 28-year-old resident of Sala must compensate for the damage of 4 million Swedish kronor (approximately $ 610 thousand). He must pay another 300 thousand crowns for distributing the film in poor quality.

    Usually the damage in such cases is calculated by the formula: the number of downloaded copies of the film × the cost of the disc with the film, with a coefficient. But in this case, a different approach was taken. Studio copyright holder named the cost of the license, for which a third-party distributor would get the right to a free screening of the film on the Internet.

    Naturally, the administrator of the torrent tracker had a hand in distributing more than one film. The court documents speak of 518 files of films and episodes of series. But for the remaining 517 cases, he received a suspended sentence plus 160 hours of community service.

    Additional compensation for low quality is associated with damage to the reputation of the copyright holder, whose products were distributed in an unacceptable form. The damage was suffered by The Walt Disney Company Nordic AB, whose interests were represented by Buena Vista International, Nordisk Film A / S and AB Svensk Filmindustri.

    Swebits, a popular Swedish torrent tracker, announced it closed in November 2011. This happened a week after the arrest of one of the site users. At that time, 25-year-old Henrik Rasmusson (Henrik Rasmusson) has been engaged in illegal activities for three and a half years. As investigators from the anti-piracy organization Antipiratbyran (now the Human Rights Alliance) found out, Henrik received a huge amount of unlicensed content from warez sites, FTP servers - and uploaded films publicly via BitTorrent, announcing a torrent tracker on the forum.

    Rights holders called Henrik “the most malicious individual pirate in the history of Sweden” and demanded for him at least a year in prison.

    The official court order is here .

    The pirate party of Sweden expressed outrage at the amount of compensation, which exceeds the maximum possible penalty for one case of copyright infringement in other countries.

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