Swedish Man Fined $650,000 For Sharing 1 Movie, Charged Extra For Low Quality 366
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)."
Low Q? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sweden? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ONE movie? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody here wants to hear how he was part of an organized criminal scheme; they just want to seem clever by explaining how copying isn't theft.
Re:Sweden? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought Sweden was a civilized country (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought Sweden was civilized?
This is absolutely barbaric.
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:5, Insightful)
Both presumably. By collecting them they scare people. The judgement was $650K, even if that is above his net worth (it may or may not be), they may be able to garnish it from future wages. $650K is below the lifetime earnings of a lot of people.
This is not to say that the ruling isn't completely unreasonable.
Piracy is tricky. People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it. It is very difficult to track down individual pirates, so most get away and reasonable fines are not a deterrent. This leads to a sort of reverse-lottery where lots of people take a chance at disastrous penalties.
Part of the problem is that the public is very split on what is reasonable.
Some people believe ALL content should be free.
Some people believe that small payments for content are reasonable, but that some industries charge "unreasonable" rates for content.
Some people believe that the industry should make all content available at the same time everywhere at the same rates.
Some people do not mind paying the rates industry charge, but prefer to download for reasons of convenience, lack o tracking, lack of advertising, or others. (many of the people who pirate Game of Thrones would purchase the content if they were allowed to without creating a subscription that they know may be difficult to cancel).
Some people are happy with any arrangement that industry wants because the purchase is voluntary .
It would be interesting to see a survey of opinions on this and see how well public opinion matches the law.
Re:ONE movie? (Score:5, Insightful)
It /isn't/ theft.
Theft is defined (at least here) as taking someone's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
Nobody has been deprived of anything, it's a copy, the originals still exist.
There might be /some/ argument that it's depriving the already super rich hollywood producers of their revenue but generally that assumes anyone who pirated something would have otherwise bought it which is certainly not the case. Most piracy is by children who don't have any money and could not have bought the content anyway.
There's also the rather thorny issue of determining which user of a particular IP address pirated the content, some people have open wifi networks, should they be responsible for the actions of others simply because they chose to be a good neighbour? I think not.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Low Q? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong on multiple levels.
starting with a 2-byte UTF8 char (say, 0xc3a4, the UTF8-equivalent of latin1's 'ä') first you break the sequence up into 0xc3 and 0xa4, already removing all meaning, which you then convert into html-entities, apparently TWICE, so what you end up sending to slashdot actually looks like: { where 123 is half of a utf8 char value, on a site expecting latin1. Ehm.
And then you loudly whine about slashdot being broken, when it (correctly) renders your input like you told it to: {
I suppose you're one of the people who curse the their TV, as in, the actual device, if nothing good is on air.
And there's even a preview function. Dammit. You are broken.
(*) That's not to imply I'd support that shit. Slashdot should be UTF8 (but your comment would be broken regardless)
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
While that's true in theory, you're forgetting that copyright law exists only to benefit Disney. The Wizard of Oz is also in the public domain, but Oz the Great and Powerful needed Disney lawyers on set [techdirt.com] to approve what shade of green they painted the witch.
If you had the audacity to attempt filming a Snow White movie without the Mouse's explicit, written consent, their legal team would relish driving you to bankruptcy--even though you'd be perfectly within your rights.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like using Hollywood accounting to stiff the talent despite the fact that the film in question is one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't steal a car, but if a mate of mine rang me up and said "I just got myself a Bugatti Veyron, would you like me to burn you a copy", I don't think I could refuse.
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:5, Insightful)
You live in Texas so you can loose judgements and not forfeit property?
Re:What the hell is the point of these huge number (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted.
Define "stealing" in this context. Because "stealing" patents by utilizing the underlying ideas in more or less spelled out ways in a patent application are the basis of most industries in their foundations. It's only much later is there any real recognition of patents, generally, as companies (and people) feel a need to create artificial barriers of entry to preempt competition.
Now, the case in point is copyright, and certainly there's a much greater view of respect for that field precisely because it is, in theory, supposed to be of a much more narrow scope. But, we're so far down that rabbit hole--the very definition of a derivative work has become so warped and the time span for a copyright to last has grown so large--that the respect for copyright at all has really had a falling out.
Which is the problem, full stop. If reasonable fines are not a deterrent, well, they're simple not a deterrent. Sometimes justice and punishment aren't a deterrent. That's life. Strive to correct this in some way only makes the situation worse. I mean, by the logic stated, jay walking should carry perhaps 20 years or even a death sentence. That's absurd.
A more major part is that those writing the laws are being effectively bribed with money from copyright holders into writing laws beneficial to copyright holders. So, that there is a "split on what is reasonable" is true. But, we live in a democracy, and I'm quite certain that way more than 90% of people are not in the "fine a person into oblivion". Hell, ever time you see a story showing the vast majority of a nation are committing piracy, it's a good sign you should rethink your laws to decriminalize it more, not try to crack down harder on it. That doesn't inherently mean that content creators won't be paid at all--although they may have to come to terms with the idea that even fewer will make a living wage from it. But, it may mean devising another system than copyright to facilitate it.
Piracy is voluntary too, between two consenting people to copy some bit of data. The rub is of course that it's piracy that's the issue, not whether people are somehow obtaining content from the industry directly without paying.
See above. I'd say Napster was a good effective opinion poll of a sort. I am wary, though, of how any survey may be stacked one way or another to distort the message people wish to express. After all, most people may feel guilty about piracy, but that doesn't mean they feel they should be punished for it. Self-guilt happens in lots of circumstances which are clearly entirely victim-less, so it's important to not extrapolate unwarrantedly even if surveys did suggest that some sort of fine or whatever would be appropriate.