12.8.2006
First verdicts in a large Finnish filesharing case
A trial against two young Finnish filesharers in Lahti, a city of 100.000 inhabitants, started a long chain of trials stemming from the late 2004 raid of Finreactor, a popular Finnish torrent site with 10.000 registered members at the time of the raid. The site including a tracker was running on a rented server in Holland. The server was confiscated and delivered to the Finnish police who thus got access to the user information and could further identify the users. By studying the transfer logs from the ratio based tracker the prosecutors picked 60 people to be charged, including the site administrators and a selection of most active sharers.
The court in Lahti concluded that copyright infringement had taken place but decided not to punish the defendants due to their young age. However, the two boys were ordered to pay compensations to the copyright owners, 2.300 euros (2.830 USD) and 1.150 euros (1.415 USD) respectively. The applied criterion for the compensations was 10 % of the retail price of the shared items. The demand of the plaintiffs was 60.000 euros (74.000 USD) . The defendants announced in the court that they fail to see anything criminal in what they did.
Similar trials will continue in various Finnish cities throughout the autumn until all 60 defendants have got their verdicts. The total compensation demands of the copyright holders - including software, movie and music companies - from the 60 defendants are 3.5 million euros (4.3 million USD). The news from these Finreactor trials will contrast sharply the public filesharing debate going on in the neighbouring Sweden. There the political pressure to legalize private filesharing just keeps growing, and the Swedish Pirate Party is ready to take the fight for legal filesharing into the Swedish Parliament.
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