Underage Finnish BitTorrent admins fined $60,000 each
Written by Smaran on October 26, 2006Four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker “Finreactor” have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totalling 60,000 dollars each.
The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close (Finnish report). This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site.
Three of the four administrators [...]
Four out of eight administrators of the Finnish BitTorrent tracker “Finreactor” have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totalling 60,000 dollars each.
The lawsuit against Finreactor has just come to a close (Finnish report). This is believed to be only the first of many filed against the site.
Three of the four administrators found guilty are under the age of 18. It is unclear how they are going to scrape together enough money to pay their fines.
With a little help from Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi), the Finnish equivalent of the RIAA (Teosto) shut down Finreactor in late 2004. It was, at the time, possibly the largest Finnish BitTorrent tracker with more than 37,000 registered members.
The Keskusrikospoliisi, after getting the go-ahead from Teosto, raided the administrators’ homes and seized computers and hard drives. The evidence they found was condemning.
Niko adds that at least one admin avoided the lawsuit because his hard drive was encrypted, and that there were more people on trial:
Alltogether 32 people were on trial. 21 of these 32 were declared guilty by the court. The eight admins mentioned here were probably only the ones represented by Turre Legal. The others were represented by another law firm.
Update: The IFPI just released a press-release which confirms that 21 admins were convicted. They have to pay compensation, damages and expenses of approximately $700,000 (in total) to the copyright holders.
21 operators of the Finreactor peer-to-peer-network were convicted yesterday by the district court of Turku in Finland. Finreactor was a BitTorrent network that had 10,000 registered users. Fourteen operators were convicted for copyright offences and seven for aiding for copyright offences. The operators were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control.
It is sad to see under-age BitTorrent fans get sentenced in court. The reality is that the content industries have decided that they are going to sue to compete with illegal filesharing. However, if a phenomenon like filehsaring is taking place at such an extraordinarily large scale, maybe there’s something to it. Maybe we need to find a new business model. Either that, or soon fans aren’t going to have enough money to legally buy the content they normally would, let alone the stuff they’re “pirating.”
Previously: TorrentPod Episode 10
Next: BitTorrent Site Admin Sent to Prison
23 Responses
“[...] have been declared guilty in court and have to pay damages totalling 60,000 dollars each.”
May I ask for some clarification here?
declared “guilty” of what?
for operating an Tracker, and by doing that, sentenced for being guilty of facilitating copyrightinfringements of others?
or are they found guilty maybe for copyrightinfringement themself because of stuff they have had on their own HDDs at home and they are found “guilty” that way?
And the 60.000 dollars; is that a fine they have to pay to the state or is that some pivate law case related “damage compansation” into some rightsholders own pockets? I ask because in a civil dispute there is no such thing as “guilt” but only liability as I understand it.
Some notes:
Alltogether 32 people were on trial. 21 of these 32 were declared guilty by the court. The eight admins mentioned here were probably only the ones represented by Turre Legal. The others were represented by another law firm.
It should be noted that this is just a ruling of a lower court. This ruling can be appealed.
The finnish arm of the RIAA is actually not Teosto. Teosto is an organisation that collects copyright levies from blank media and radio stations. Since this is Europe, we have IFPI instead of the RIAA, and the finnish arm of IFPI would be TTVK and ÄKT. However Teosto was among the list of plaintiffs.
At least one admin is known to have avoided the lawsuit entirely because his drive was encrypted. The police were not able to crack it.
Thanks for the notes Niko
My Finnish isn’t what it used to be…
However, TEOSTO does look a lot like the Finnish RIAA
@ Ernesto
See ÄKT: http://www.ifpi.fi/english/ifpi.html
Also for TTVK: http://www.antipiracy.fi/inenglish/
Finland has a copyright levy system. We pay a levy on blank media and TEOSTO is responsible for dividing this among its member composers. A lot of the money is wasted on bureaucracy, and only those composers who get their music played on radio actually get paid anything. Still it does represent individual composers, and not the corporations of the recording industry.
Umm.. I just read through the other link I posted and apparently Teosto is a member of the TTVK (a.k.a CIAPC). Oh well…
Wow thats a lot of cash!
All these RIAA branches are trying scare tactics. Sue and arrest people and scare us away from using this tech. Until someone is actually arrested in Canada I can’t see me stopping.
And as far as I know, there is a loop hole in the Canadian law that keeps us immune from being sued. I believe is goes something like if we only keep the data for 24 hours after viewing it, we are in the clear.
But it sucks that these kids are being fined so much for being admins of this site. Someone should open a account so people can donate to help bail em out.
[quote comment="17397"]
At least one admin is known to have avoided the lawsuit entirely because his drive was encrypted. The police were not able to crack it.[/quote]
Just to set the record straight, the admin you are referring to avoided the lawsuit because he was (and still is) underage. He had his drives encrypted, that’s true, but that wasn’t the reason he wasn’t prosecuted.
Also, we had torrent users capped at 10000. There were a lot more members on the forum section that had edonkey-links, but that part of the site was not part of this court case.
Maybe they were actually fined for pirated OS like Win XP. Because I know a friend that runs a call center that $60,000 sounds like the ammount they were fined per computer from a Microsoft affiliate.
Vittu!
let’s encrypt! :D
i wanna know what program he used to encrypt his hd that made it uncrackable for police…
[quote comment="17397"]Some notes:
At least one admin is known to have avoided the lawsuit entirely because his drive was encrypted. The police were not able to crack it.[/quote]
Niko and All,
This is a very interesting point in this case. An uncrackable disk isn’t a clear reason for him to avoid the case. I don’t have the lawsuit files to understand the encrypted disk.
Are they sued because
a) they operated a system “encouraging” pirate?
b) they pirated the copyrighted content(eg. file, software)?
c) the 7 people aided people in b) to offend copyrighted?
My interest is:
1. What evidence the police discovered on those people’s hardisk before the start the trial
2. Isn’t the information, webserver/BT tracker log etc., enough to start the trial?
3. How did the lucky boy encrypted the disk?
Anyone has more clue? I would be happy enough to discuss it. I am available at
jirongzhou at gmail.com
skype: jirongzhou
“At least one admin is known to have avoided the lawsuit entirely because his drive was encrypted. The police were not able to crack it.”
This is true, but the reason he avoided the lawsuit is that he was under 15-years-old, so he can not be charged in Finland. He was one of the main technical administrators in Finreactor. So, many moderators (with nothing to do with the administrators or SysOps) were sentenced, but one of the most important guys avoided it.
Investigators of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigatio threatened this guy with big fines etc, but he didn’t gave them the passwords.
[quote comment="17608"]
Just to set the record straight, the admin you are referring to avoided the lawsuit because he was (and still is) underage. He had his drives encrypted, that’s true, but that wasn’t the reason he wasn’t prosecuted.[/quote]
[quote comment="17725"]“At least one admin is known to have avoided the lawsuit entirely because his drive was encrypted. The police were not able to crack it.”
This is true, but the reason he avoided the lawsuit is that he was under 15-years-old, so he can not be charged in Finland.[/quote]
I stand corrected in this issue.
Guilty of what man?, is it illegal to even have fun on the internet
Does this mean that when i was 11 and taping striaght to my tape deck, music from my radio, I was actually pirating and didnt know it? Sheesh what a fucked up world we live in. “You can rape and molested kids and get away with it, but woe be tide anyone if we catch you pirating, we fuck you big time” This is the message I seem to be getting. What a fucking waste of peeps money and they wonder why this world is no longer safe. The Aliens are coming, The Aliens are coming. Oh shit their already here. :)
i agree, this world sucks, im outa here! =P
what is BitTorrent tracker?
also why do the people at the top of stuff like p2p networks and bit torrent stuff get fined. what dont the people who download or shair it get fined.
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