Alleged Pirate Walks Free Under New Anti-Piracy Law
Written by Ernesto on October 14, 2009Earlier this year the Swedish Parliament passed the IPRED law, making it easier for copyright holders to obtain file-sharers’ details from ISPs. In the months that passed, no music and movie sharers were sued. Instead, the first IPRED case dealt with pirated ebooks, but this case has now been thrown out by the Appeal Court.
The first court case testing the new IPRED anti-piracy legislation has proven the law is not the silver bullet the anti-piracy lobby hoped it would be.
The law is intended to make it easier for copyright holders to obtain the personal details of alleged file-sharers from ISPs, but the ISPs are not handing information over without a fight.
This April, five book publishers handed a request to a local court for information on the owner of an FTP-server that allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books. Although it was a private server and the audio books couldn’t have been made available to the general public, the court ordered the ISP Ephone to hand over the details of the person behind the IP address.
In a response to the negative decision Ephone consulted its customers, asking them whether they should appeal the case or not. Of the 20,000 customers who responded, a massive 99% were in favor of an appeal, so Ephone duly took the case to the Appeal Court.
Yesterday the Appeal Court announced its verdict, which turned out to be a win for the ISP and the alleged copyright infringer. The Appeal Court nullified the earlier decision of the District Court against the ISP, and ruled that Ephone does not have to hand over the details of the FTP owner to the book publishers.
The Appeal Court argued that, even though the FTP server contained copyrighted works, probable cause for copyright infringement had not been proven. Since the server in question required login credentials there was no distribution to the public, the Appeal Court said.
The decision of the Appeal Court was received with huge disappointment by the book publishers, but welcomed by Ephone and the majority of its customers. Still, this decision may not be the end of the first IPRED case as it may still be appealed at the Supreme Court.
Previously: Labour MP: Disconnecting File-Sharers is Futile
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41 Responses
Info justs wants to be free
lawl , love it :) , topsites are gonna love that :P
Silver bullet is failing, start loading some lawyers instead
@3, shoot lawyers at people? Though I guess they aren’t good for anything else :p
I see two errors here:
#1: Not only customers voted. I voted, with no login and no asking whether I was a customer. They asked the public.
#2: While this is indeed great news, it may not be relevant – this was (as stated) a *private* FTP server, which was *the reason the case was closed*. Had this been on bittorrent it would most likely have gone the other way…
Technically speaking, a closed private tracker requires a login and doesn’t have distribution to the ‘public’ (just the tracker admins 50k+ closest friends? lol).
While I agree with you Thraprod, It would be even better if the sites were empty targets until you had logged in (like black cats).
I’m curious. Can we put EULAs up, such that use of a site requires you to agree to not sue them?
@6
What Ernesto fails to mention is that the court also said that since the book publishers didn’t even mention the login procedure and how available the login credentials were, the case was thrown out.
If the book publishers had investigated and proved a wide availability of login information the situation would be very different.
And now they know better.
It really depends on who was getting access. Only the person who legally purchased those audio books has any right to hear them, so by placing them on the server he potentially was breaking a law, but there’s no probable cause to actually warrant a case unless they can prove he was making them available to anyone.
And, no, I don’t believe for a second that someone would store 2000 audio books on an FTP for personal use, if they can prove the host was letting others access the data, he will lose.
i’m a pirate, this has no bearing on anything p2p, sorry.
good to hear tho, good news indeed.
DuellistOrigins
No. No license can be in collision with law. I can’t put a line in licence agreement (that nobody reads during program install) that all your base are belong to me.
The audio book companies now has to cover the ISP’s expenses which amounts to ~€20 000.
It’s also interesting to note that two of the five judges opposed this decision and reasoned that since there were lots of files on the server there must have been lots of people having access to it (that’s also what the lower court whose decision was now overturned argued) which should be enough for probable cause.
“And, no, I don’t believe for a second that someone would store 2000 audio books on an FTP for personal use, if they can prove the host was letting others access the data, he will lose.”
Just a little while back it would be hard for many to belive anyone would have over a thousand movies and 50k songs… but ummm, a friend of mine does, as do other friends because with huge harddisks at cheap prices, its pretty easy to just keep them instead of deleting them.
Audio books hardly takes up space and for all you know this guy travels a lot and needs to constantly refer to them.
Had he NOT password protected them, this would be an entirely different story, but since it was password protected…. whatever i have behind my wall is none of anyones f*cking business.
MASSIVE win! :)
For court it doesn’t make a difference if he read those books, can read those books, can’t read those books, “He has got audiobook fetish!”, whatever. It’s none of the plaintiff’s business why he keeps books.
eZee.se… wow.. just wow.
That quote is in reference of someone PURCHASING 2000 audio books for personal use. It doesn’t matter how many movies or songs you have on your HD if you purchased them. The fact that you reference “not deleting them” indicates that they pirated them, not ripped them from the DVD they purchased.
The important thing here is precedent. Yes, it would have gone the other way had it been bittorrent, but this proves that the law is open to interpretation. Perhaps in the future, a case will be able to cite this one and get off, establishing more precedent. Eventually the law itself could be nullified.
@16
Doesn’t matter. If I have something in my possession, I don’t have to prove to anyone that I own it. It’s up to them to prove that it was stolen. For example, a book publisher can’t get a warrant to go into my house and demand to see the receipts for every book on my bookshelf.
In the RSS-feed, the country is never named.
@18 You’d hope for that to be true, but you can never be sure with today’s “legal” systems, especially that of the Dutch. They should rename them to Courts of Law(ndering money for corporate interests).
“The fact that you reference “not deleting them” indicates that they pirated them, not ripped them from the DVD they purchased.”
While I neither deny nor confirm they were purchased, can you kindly explain to me why “not deleting them” indicates to you they were pirated?
I happen to buy a lot of classical music CDs and DVDs, these are mostly from indie and small companies as its not enough money for the majors to fiddle with (Mozart, Paganini, Bach etc) and as i do so i rip them to my laptop so i dont have to bother with popping a new cd/dvd in when i want to change albums as well as get better battery life as theres no CD to spin, plus i can just keep my albums in a box saving shelve space… but occasionally, I do run out of hdd space and i have deleted several albums just to re-rip them once i upgrade my hdd/s – a perfectly legit example of my own use of why “not deleting them” does not have to mean they were pirated.
Haha, nice! This might be the re-birth of a wider use of ftp for piracy.
This case has nothing to do with file sharing.
It’s about probable cause and Court of Appeals pretty much ruled along the lines that were established in case law for a long time.
There is no reason to think supreme court will rule otherwise.
If book publishers appeal, it will be a waste of their time and money.
Agree with #23. This isn’t really a win for filesharing, it’s more like a fail on behalf of the e-book companies and the prosecutor who didn’t word the lawsuit the right way or extend it to cover all possibilities.
Unfortunately, we can’t rely on lawyers always being incompetent.
Post 25!
Use SFTP next time, then no-one will know!
Sweden is so damn biased. Rights holders just can’t get a fair trial!
They simply could not find the “right” biased, corrupted, hypocrite judge…what a shame ;-)
IBM will be sad if somebody acuses others of illegal activity on the cloud.
Sensitive data should never be posted online or maintained on the cloud without at least encryption with that said there is tons of space on it(cloud) an to many it is easy to use the cloud than it is to setup a storage server in the house and lets not forget the need to back up data in different physical locations to guarantee that data survives in case of natural disaster.
I can clearly see how this kind of thing will grow in the future, with more speed and capacity new uses will be made available, people today can use GMail to store data just look at FSGmail it is cheaper then to buy an HDD.
2000 audio books @ avg. EUR 8….
That’s EUR 16,000… Quite a little “fetish” this chap’s got! Or maybe they were not EUR 8… LOL!!!
Then he just happens to store them on an ftp server, as opposed on a regular box that cannot be accessed from outside.
Doesn’t bother me in the least though.. In fact, I just wish I knew this guy well enough to have the logins to his ftp server.
This is a very nice idea.
The sad thing is SOMEBODY SOLD HIM OUT!!
Well, unfortunately the ISP had to “ask” if they should appeal, im sorry but there never should have been a question, ISP’s should stand up ffor their customers more often, especially where privacy is concerned. I am glad they did have the b8lls to do it and the outcome is acceptible..
As I read this article a thought occurred to me, this past weekend some friends of mine hit a few garage sales and bought a collection of D&D role playing mags, I may be wrong but that was an illegal sale/purchase according to current copyright laws…wasnt it?
Well done!
6 Oct 14, 2009 at 18:12 by Thraprod
50k closest friends… I LOL’ed.
Recently a CD of mine stopped being recognized by the drives and I downloaded it from BT. Am I a pirate? =[
That’s about how something can fail so much that it becomes an instant win. :-)
@33
For the RIAA you are a Pirate and a Babykiller.
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@36
Thank you. That’s my grab-a-granny night sorted. Can I download one too?
“till, this decision may not be the end of the first IPRED case as it may still be appealed at the Supreme Court.”
Of course it will. And the pessimist in me suspects the ePhone will lose in the Supreme Court because that’s where all the bribes^C^C^C^C^C, sorry I mean lobby money, go.
Of course the server had a defined public access.
ping
with this retarded reasoning.. a locked storage closet full of books is at risk.
Its an exact.. and i do mean exact.. comparison.
we better burn all our books less someone read them and commit copyright infringement..
login : anon
pass: topsite
LOL
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