Torrent Site User Who Transferred 120TB of Pirated Content Avoids Prison (torrentfreak.com) 45
A torrent site user accused of downloading and uploading at least 120TB of movies, TV shows, eBooks, music and software, has avoided an immediate prison term. The 28-year-old was arrested as part of a police operation against DanishBytes. A member of the same site was sentenced earlier this month after he uploaded Netflix content obtained using hacked credentials. TorrentFreak reports: Early November 2021, Denmark's Public Prosecutor for Special Economic and International Crime (SOIK) announced that six people had been arrested following criminal referrals by Rights Alliance. All were members and/or operators of ShareUniversity and DanishBytes. Prosecution of site operators is not uncommon but when it's deemed in the public interest, pirate site users can also face charges. Every case is unique so criteria differ, especially across national borders, but when evidence shows large volumes of infringement, successful prosecutions become more likely. That was the case when a former DanishBytes user was sentenced last week. According to Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, the 28-year-old man was a regular site member and wasn't involved in running the site. That being said, evidence showed that for the period January 2021 to November 2021, he downloaded and/or uploaded no less than 3,000 copyrighted works, including movies, TV shows, music, books, audiobooks and comics.
Information released by the National Unit for Special Crimes (NSK), a Danish police unit focused on cybercrime, organized crime, and related financial crime, reveals that the user's traffic statistics interested prosecutors. "During the period, the man downloaded no less than 100 TB and uploaded no less than 20 TB of copyrighted material," NSK says. BitTorrent trackers operating a ratio model usually insist on a better ratio of downloads to uploads but DanishBytes' situation was out of the ordinary.
The site launched in January 2021 in the wake of other sites being shut down, so had to get going from a standing start with no users. Even when arrests were being made, the site still had a relatively small userbase, which can limit opportunities to upload more. That may have been a blessing in disguise. Faced with the evidence, the man decided to plead guilty and was sentenced last week at the Court in Vibourg. In common with similar prosecutions recently, he received a suspended conditional sentence of 60 days' probation, 80 hours of community service, and confiscation of his computer equipment. The case against the DanishBytes user began with a Rights Alliance investigation and a referral to the police. As part of his sentence, the man must pay the anti-piracy group DKK 5,000 (US$600) in compensation but Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund is focused on the deterrent effect of another successful prosecution.
Information released by the National Unit for Special Crimes (NSK), a Danish police unit focused on cybercrime, organized crime, and related financial crime, reveals that the user's traffic statistics interested prosecutors. "During the period, the man downloaded no less than 100 TB and uploaded no less than 20 TB of copyrighted material," NSK says. BitTorrent trackers operating a ratio model usually insist on a better ratio of downloads to uploads but DanishBytes' situation was out of the ordinary.
The site launched in January 2021 in the wake of other sites being shut down, so had to get going from a standing start with no users. Even when arrests were being made, the site still had a relatively small userbase, which can limit opportunities to upload more. That may have been a blessing in disguise. Faced with the evidence, the man decided to plead guilty and was sentenced last week at the Court in Vibourg. In common with similar prosecutions recently, he received a suspended conditional sentence of 60 days' probation, 80 hours of community service, and confiscation of his computer equipment. The case against the DanishBytes user began with a Rights Alliance investigation and a referral to the police. As part of his sentence, the man must pay the anti-piracy group DKK 5,000 (US$600) in compensation but Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund is focused on the deterrent effect of another successful prosecution.
120 TB? (Score:2)
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I don't know how similar Danish law is to US law, since this wouldn't be a criminal offense in the US...
But in the US, civil statutory damages are applied per work infringed.
1 work that was 120TB in size? Still 1 infringement.
30,000 works at 120TB in size? 30,000 infringements.
In the US, 30k works, at maximum statutory civil penalty (for a willful infringer) would be $4.5B.
Honestly, I think I'd take the 60 days in jail.
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under spanish law what he did is perfectly legal (i do it all the time) as long as he didn't get any monetary benefit from the activity. sucks to be danish. sucks even more to be north american, if that's any consolation.
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dude ... you really seem to need help. would you like to talk? ok, go find a tree :P
Re: 120 TB? (Score:1)
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as long as he didn't get any monetary benefit from the activity.
That's the threshold for criminal liability in the US.
Civil suits are where you get fucked in the US, when it comes to copyright infringement.
And ya- the statutory civil penalties are draconian.
I'm not an expert in Spanish law (which is to say I know precisely nothing about it whatsoever), however a quick google indicates that Spanish law also subjects infringers to liability for civil damages.
The only thing I could find regarding legality was a Judge declaring that downloading music is non-criminal (
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Another judge declared that IP information can only be associated with subscriber information in the case of criminal trial.
Ergo, sharing copyrighted materials is de facto free from civil liability (even if very much not de jure) since rights holders are legally barred from being able to identify the infringers.
Honestly, that's kind of a perversion of justice. I wouldn't brag about that.
It means that in Spain, there is no protected
Re:120 TB? (Score:4, Interesting)
It means that in Spain, there is no protected for copyrighted works for sharing on the internet. Be it a program you wrote, or a piece of music backed up by a multi-billion dollar record label.
as hinted on my other reply:
1) software is excluded from the deal
2) unprotected? you may share, but not profit from it
so "there is no protection" isn't really true. unfair competition is definitely protected against, nobody can make business with your stuff (like you do), but freely sharing the ideas you very intentionally made public is not. i see nothing wrong with that, i find it's actually an excellent compromise in protecting both freedom and business. you wanna do business? talk business. otherwise you're free.
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so "there is no protection" isn't really true. unfair competition is definitely protected against, nobody can make business with your stuff (like you do), but freely sharing the ideas you very intentionally made public is not. i see nothing wrong with that, i find it's actually an excellent compromise in protecting both freedom and business. you wanna do business? talk business. otherwise you're free.
It is true, though.
It's undeniably true.
For what follows, I'm going to ask that we ignore criminality.
Sharing files isn't "illegal" in the US, either, unless you're trying to profit from it.
We're going to focus on the civil side of things, i.e., the rights of a copyright holder to recoup damages for infringement upon their copyright.
In both Spain, and the US, civil damages can in fact be recouped.
A court ruling in which a judge made it essentially impossible for a rights holder to identify a file sh
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The "fuck you!" given to the abusive zillion dollar corporations makes sense. But it can be accomplished in a way that doesn't fuck the small rightsholder.
As I said, I wouldn't call this a victory.
i don't frame it as a battle. we either all lose or we all win. yes i am an anarchist at heart and as such i'm positive to get screwed, but in the meantime ...
i dispute that the small rightsholder is getting fucked here. well, he most surely is, but by the abusive corporation, not by the regular citizen that doesn't pay that corporation and still somehow enjoys the stuff. that's another crux, the "lost revenue". which is (imo) usually total bullshit taken to ridiculously crazy extremes in the us, and barrin
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i don't frame it as a battle. we either all lose or we all win. yes i am an anarchist at heart and as such i'm positive to get screwed, but in the meantime ...
That's fair.
i dispute that the small rightsholder is getting fucked here. well, he most surely is, but by the abusive corporation, not by the regular citizen that doesn't pay that corporation and still somehow enjoys the stuff.
Small rightsholders self-publish all the time.
The regular citizen is also not paying them..
that's another crux, the "lost revenue". which is (imo) usually total bullshit taken to ridiculously crazy extremes in the us, and barring some notorious exceptions overwhelmingly relativized in european courts in general (as you just reported).
Oh, I agree 1000%.
The damages regime for copyright infringement needs to be dialed down. It's obvious that corporate interests have managed to jack those civil damage statutory limits to the fucking moon, and that is wrong.
Someone doing this shouldn't be able to be wiped out by it. They should, however, owe money for what they have used.
The fact that remediation efforts elsewhere have not been fair doe
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It's really the "zillion dollar corporations" who killed independent artists in Spain, and the way that they did it is tied up with the reason that people in Spain feel justified in file-sharing. The SGAE (local equivalent of the RIAA) receives money from (a) licenc
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More likely you are a puppet account for Whinney the Poo's [sic] troll farm who just posts against any criticism of China regardless of how relevant it is.
The numbers seem to show it was the judicial rulings that put the nails in the coffin.
That your local megacorp lobbying groups were parasitizing small artists, I wouldn't argue though. Not even a little bit.
(a) If I write my own music and perform it in public, I have to pay for a licence, and that money that I paid to be allowed to perform my own music then gets distributed to the major artists. I'm unlikely to get a single euro back.
You charge above license price, and you play, and you get paid. This was working. It was wrong, from an ethical standpoint, but it was working.
(b) Since everyone has had to pay a tax which is conceived as ensuring that artists don't lose out due to file-sharing, why should they not share files? It may not be technically lawful, but in effect we've been pre-emptively fined for doing it so the moral argument against actually doing it has been undermined.
I empathize with this viewpoint.
The only answer I can give is... because it's morally fucking wrong.
I'll caveat that with, if you choose to only ever infringe
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It's trying to stop ordinary people from sharing which is the perversion. What a stupid way that is to try to fund art. The only reason we have this whole idea of copyright in the first place is so that culture can be assimilated by capital, or in cruder terms, owned in vast quantities by rich people. It sort of made sense when you needed capital, like a printing press, in order to copy things at meaningful scale, but now we have a super-efficient copying and distribution machine which any random person can
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art for money is like sex for money
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Once it became economic to reproduce works in mass, laws were required to protect those that owned the rights to them.
Prior to that, manual duplication rendered the concern moot.
Sharing things that you have no license to share is morally wrong.
You can justify it however helps you sleep at night, but it is wrong in most of the societies of the world.
The world is desperately in need of more socialistic ways of making sure artists don't become starving artists.
I would consider this a fair alternative, and I'd support it.
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ianal, but there is that concept of "right to private copy" which enables you to copy any ip you legally own for any purpose except (monetary) profit. any use includes transfers, though, so if you are the rightful owner of that copy, you are free to share it with your peers ... even on the internet. so torrents are fine. again, don't profit with $$$ in any way while doing it, not even indirectly, e.g. don't get caught serving ads on a site or even playing that music in your barbershop, you will get sued. al
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Nice. So if there were a perhaps something like a Spanish linode where you can have your own vps you could do your torrenting there and they wouldn't be able to subpoena your logs because you didn't break the law...
Frankly if I were on any jury involving copyright I would never vote to convict ( jury nullification baby! ) but it would never get to a jury trial I think.
Re: 120 TB? (Score:1)
since this wouldn't be a criminal offense in the US...
Uploading copyrighted [imaginary property] is a federal offense in the U.S.
Everyone has an asshole; some appear to have several. Triple-mask that asshole, asshole.
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Uploading copyrighted [imaginary property] is a federal offense in the U.S.
No, it is not.
It is a simple civil tort.
Distributing for profit, is however a federal offense in the US.
Also, ripping from real-media and distributing can be a federal crime in limited circumstances.
Everyone has an asshole; some appear to have several. Triple-mask that asshole, asshole.
If you wish to educate yourself, you can start here. [justice.gov]
If you have trouble reading legalese, you can use this [pagepate.com] to help you understand that you're wrong.
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"I'm don't want to read the stupid article, but I'm assuming they let him off because 120 TB is not much."
Exactly, just checked my uTorrentcounter and it's at 400TB since the last time I flushed it.
He should have invested $5 into a VPN I guess.
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Dark future ahead (Score:3)
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This is scary. Prison sentences for just uploading content seems like a step too far.
Not a problem. They can pay the civil penalties [slashdot.org] for each infringement.
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Maybe someone who is familiar with Danish law can explain this one. Denmark is part of the EU so I'm guessing that copyright laws are somewhat similar to other EU countries, where it's mostly a civil matter, except in cases where it's done in a large scale for profit.
The way they usually get pirates like this guy is to claim they were making money out of ads. A lot of tracker sites use ads to pay the bills, but it's enough. Downloading the content directly from Netflix (there are tools to rip the stream) an
Re: (Score:2)
I was depending on homeless copyright infringement saints, immune to deterrence by fines, to host content I want to pirate...
What's the going rate for the ID card of a junkie?
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"Prison sentences for just uploading content"
Nowhere in the article does it say that anyone went to prison just for uploading. The one person specifically mentioned as receiving a prison sentence also committed a computer trespass.
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Well, usually there's an acceleration factor depending on how much you violate the law by.
For example, if you go over the speed limit by 1-2mph, it's a minor offense, probably civil. Go over a bit more, say 10mph, and it's probably that and may be a point on your license. But do you think that should be the case if you're going double, triple the speed limit?. Should someone doing 100 in a 35 zone just get a fine and some p
.2 Ratio (Score:3)
What a shitty leech. Probably only has any ratio at all because of uploading happening while he was still trying to download.
Re: .2 Ratio (Score:2)
TFA says that the few users they had was a blessing in disguise.
Anyway, there are no criminals here. Just political prisoners.
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The guy probably paid to keep his ratio artificially looking good on the site. Like most "pay" torrent sites have a way out if you wanna leech, but you still show a good ratio on the site to avoid bans as that is how many of these sites make money. By selling what they call "ratio fixers" just like "microtransactions". Which may be what that guy was doing. Copy and pasting from one example, one torrent site lists "ratio fixers" and are hilariously worded such as 'donate 10 for 20 gig upload' , 'donate 20 f
A political victim (Score:3)
Fuck your Mickey Mouse laws.
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As much as I agree with you about copyright terms, this guy was ripping stuff from Netflix so chances are a lot of it would be within even a 1 year copyright term.
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Interesting.
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I do that as well, although I don't waste my time ripping and just grab the video from The Pirate Bay or RARBG.
Netflix must wonder why people subscribe and then don't watch anything.
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All copyrighted material is fair game until the copyright law is reasonable.
Netflix should join the fight for fair copyright.
The REAL crime here is obvious... (Score:3)
1-5 seed ratio? Maybe prison IS appropriate for leeches.
Uploading or making available (Score:2)
6.5 PB. (Score:1)