swedish court

Last month, a Swedish court heard the case against a woman accused of sharing 45,000 music tracks online. No other personal file-sharing case in the country had ever considered so many alleged infringements.

The case dated back to the 58-year-old’s alleged actions in 2007, although it took a full year after IFPI’s investigation for her house to be visited by authorities.

During the search a Direct Connect client was found installed on a computer, complete with logs which were later shown to contain entries backing up IFPI’s investigation.

November last year, the Swedish Appeal Court found three people behind The Pirate Bay guilty of contributory copyright infringement offenses.

The trio were handed prison sentences and ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages.

While yesterday we wrote about how a Swedish court acquitted a 15-year-old for file sharing some movies, today a court gave a 60-year-old man two years of conditional jail time along with a pretty large fine.

While US courts have been awarding tens of thousands of dollars per song for the few people found guilty of unauthorized file sharing, many people have noted how utterly ridiculous those awards are, in comparison to any actual harm.

It appears that a court over in Sweden appears to agree.

Just three days after filmmaker Simon Klose started a fundraiser to complete his upcoming Pirate Bay documentary, the seed funding goal of $25,000 has already been reached.

Early 2010, a Swedish court banned Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site.

Last month, the site's former spokesperson Peter Sunde was also banned and faces a heavy fine for non-compliance.

Earlier this year The Pirate Bay's co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij were banned from operating the site by a Swedish court.

Today, The Pirate Bay's former spokesperson Peter Sunde was added to this list, and now faces a fine of nearly $70,000 if he does not comply with the decision.

In the last year or two the entertainment industries have targeted many BitTorrent sites. The majority of the verdicts against these sites have thus far ruled in favor of the copyright holders.

Only in Spain have BitTorrent sites been repeatedly found to operate within the boundaries of the law.

In July 2009, four movie companies applied to a Swedish court requesting that it force an ISP to hand over the personal details of one of its clients.

The application was made under the IPRED legislation introduced in April of the same year, which made it easier to track down and identify alleged copyright infringers.

File sharing, file sharing, file sharing. Whether it's college students by BitTorrent, schoolkids copying tracks off their friends during study hall — do they even still have study hall?

— or grandmas making Glenn Miller mix tapes, file sharing seems to be everywhere. At least, that's the story the record industry is telling — to anyone who will listen — and the one they'll be telling a Swedish court starting this week, as the four founders of the Tracker di tutti Trackers, The Pirate Bay, go on trial in Stockholm.