It’s common for sites to be run by people employed in the computing industry or by those still in education and hoping to get into that area in the future. However, a case brought to a conclusion yesterday is probably the first in which the accused was a farmer.

The case, brought by Antipiratbyran and the IFPI, dates back to December 2011 and claims that the defendant, a man from Sweden, was responsible for administering the PowerBits private BitTorrent tracker between 2007 and 2009.

As is so often the case, the plaintiffs in the case claimed that PowerBits was a “commercial file-sharing service” and its admin “regularly received and assimilated payments from the users.”

Those payments took the form of donations from PowerBits users but were framed as direct payment for illegal content by the anti-piracy companies. Making matters worse, the tax authorities said the income had been generated in the course of running an Internet business and as such was both undeclared and untaxed.

In June 2012 the Varberg District Court accepted that the then 34-year-old hadn’t uploaded content himself but had indeed assisted in the copyright infringements of PowerBits users. He was also found guilty of tax and accounting offenses relating to the income generated from the site.

The case went to appeal and yesterday the decision was handed down.

A Court of Appeal judge upheld the earlier ruling and found the now 35-year-old guilty of aiding in copyright infringement. He was also found guilty of accounting fraud and was sentenced to one year in jail.

In addition to the custodial sentence the man was told to pay almost $62,000 against an undeclared income of $126,600 generated from the 65,000 member site during 2007 and 2008, some of which was spent converting a pigsty into a datacenter.

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

The site, the now-defunct private BitTorrent tracker PowerBits.org, is described as a site which allowed users to upload torrent links with the intention of making copyright material available to the public. Among those who provided evidence in the case were Antipiratbyran and IFPI. The sample set of infringements included nine music albums and ten films.

PowerBits was further described as “a commercial file-sharing service” in the sense that the admin “regularly received and assimilated payments from the users.” These payments appear to be what most private torrent sites call “donations” although it’s clear that the authorities did not consider them gifts.

When TorrentFreak spoke with Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyran about the case he framed the site’s operations as a business, an opinion apparently shared by the Swedish tax authorities. They considered PowerBits to be an Internet business that generated “significant revenues” and on this basis went on to accuse the administrator of failing to fulfill his accounting obligations and avoiding tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.

The Varberg district court heard yesterday that through PowerBits the now 34-year-old former admin had helped to make at least 2,000 copyright protected works available to the public without rightsholder permission.

Although the Court found that the defendant had not directly made available any of the works himself, he was found guilty of assisting in the copyright infringements of the site’s users.

The man was also found guilty of accounting and tax offenses, having allegedly generated nearly $207,000 from PowerBits without declaring the income. A request to confiscate almost $54,000 was denied.

He was sentenced to one year in prison and banned from running a business for three years.

“In addition to PowerBits, there are a number of similar Swedish illegal services with identical business ideas,” Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyran told TorrentFreak. “The services often have a technical argument when they explain why their business model is legal. So far this has not been successful and those responsible for The Pirate Bay and PowerBits have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.”

Swedish sites that refuse to close down are being reported to the police, Pontén adds.

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