The IPKat reports on the legal deliberations surrounding the punishment of four Swedish copyright pirates who distributed movies over the internet. Two of the defendants have appealed to the Swedish Supreme Court on the grounds that the damages awarded are unreasonably high, relative to their incomes.
The original trial of the four pirates concluded with the District Court giving them prison sentences of between 6 and 10 months. The court also ordered the pirates to pay around SEK1mn (USD110k) damages to the claimants. The defendants appealed the case to the Court of Appeal, which found they had committed between 45 and 118 infringements of copyright law. However, the court considered the young age of the defendants and other mitigating factors before deciding that a prison sentence was not justified. The Court of Appeal increased the damages to SEK4mn (USD440k) instead, as based on the cost of a hypothetical license to distribute the pirated works.
There will be plenty of sympathy for businesses who say damages should be punitive in order to discourage piracy. On the other hand, many of those businesses are too cheap to spend thousands on fixing the systematic leakages that will subsequently cost them millions in lost revenues. The retail cost of a movie is not the same as the amount people are willing to pay. There is evidence that pirates spend as much on copyrighted content as other customers, and the implication is that reducing piracy to zero would not lead to greatly increased revenues for rightsholders. Sweden has been a hotbed of internet piracy, so it will be interesting to see how their Supreme Court formulates principles on what is a fair punishment in cases like these.
