Rather than deal with the issue internally, the school’s head teacher escalated the matter by calling in the police to investigate. Five months later and the boy has appeared in court but unusually for these kinds of cases, things went much better than expected.

Due to the interest in the case, the boy attended court under the media spotlight and following a request from Peter Gillberg, the boy’s lawyer, the case was heard behind closed doors.

Before Judge Tove Klackenberg at the Gothenburg District Court, the defendant admitted downloading 24 Hollywood movies from the torrent sites tankafetast.se and tankaner.se, but claimed he was unaware that he was subsequently uploading the same material to other BitTorrent users.

Two of the lay judges found that the 15-year-old had indeed been negligent but not grossly so, the benchmark required for a conviction. As a result the boy was acquitted.

“It’s important to be here,” said Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg who turned out in support at the District Court today.

“I can only imagine how it feels to be fifteen and dragged into court for it doing one of the nicest things to do, sharing culture.”

While lawyer Peter Gillberg confirmed that his client is “satisfied” with the ruling, the story won’t end there.

“This is simply absurd,” prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told DN.se. “I can see that lay judges can be wrong in cases that are a little unusual and complex, and that have a political dimension.”

Ingblad later confirmed that not only will the case go to the Court of Appeal, but operations against both file-sharers and site operators will be stepped up.

“There will be more and more charges,” he said. “There will be more investigations against those who administer the illegal services, that is, file-sharing sites.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

During a closer examination IT staff found that the student had 24 Hollywood movies stored on his hard drive. The 15-year-old boy in question had obtained them from two Swedish torrent sites – tankafetast.se and tankaner.se.

Ultimately the school’s head teacher learned of the IT technicians’ discovery but rather than deal with the issue in-house, she chose to drastically escalate the matter – by calling in the police. Now, five months after the alleged offenses, the boy is on trial in Sweden.

“Our policy is to always notify the police if we have suspicion of a crime,” the head teacher told GP.se. “It is not our job to investigate, it’s a matter for the police.”

The investigation was led by the International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm and the trial began in the Gothenburg District Court yesterday. Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, a veteran of such cases, says this trial is a record-breaker – no-one this young has ever been prosecuted for file-sharing violations.

“If I find that I can prove a crime, I have to prosecute. I do not consider the person’s age or whether file sharing has occurred on a small or large scale,” Ingblad says. “By contrast, his young age, of course, is important in terms of what punishment he will be sentenced to.”

Although Ingblad says he will press for the teenager to be sentenced as a juvenile, the punishment for copyright infringements still run from fines to two years in jail.

“Politicians and copyright monopolists alike have been promising solemnly to never send the police after the entire younger generation,” Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “Here, we can see for ourselves how much those promises were worth. The politicians who let this happen need to be kicked out of office.”

During the hearing the boy admitted downloading movies such as The Fighter, The Mechanic, The Social Network and Scary Movie 4, but said that he had no idea he was uploading them to others at the same time.

“It’s paradoxical,” says Inglblad. “The thousands of small users who are online to download a single movie is a prerequisite for the entire system to work.”

“To prosecute one of them is of course just scratching the surface. But if you want the legal download services to work there must be at least a small chance you will get caught if you download illegally, even if you are young,” he says.

Rick Falkvinge sees the situation somewhat differently, in that sharers should not be subjected to criminal trials but rewarded, and that hopefully attitudes in the future will change.

“If the government should interfere at all with people sharing culture, it should be in the form of medals to those who share the most,” he told us.

“It is of poor comfort for a 15-year-old in a criminal court that the laws will have changed to prove him right and dignified several years later. In the meantime, he has the full moral support of pirates all over the world, from San Francisco to Sydney,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.