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back to article File-swapping Icelanders slapped on wrists

Nine Icelanders were convicted this week for sharing movies on the popular DC++ file sharing network. Eight of the defendants were sentenced to two years' probation while the principal defendant, Bjarki Magnússon, was given a 30-day suspended sentence at a hearing before Reykjavík District Court. The nine face legal bills …

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  1. Ralph B
    Unhappy

    Traffic Drop

    > According to SMÁÍS, the raid was directly responsible for a 40 per cent drop in

    > Iceland's net traffic volumes.

    If only we could get plod to treat spammers the same way.

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  2. Andy Worth
    Coat

    2.5 TB?

    That's a lot of porn....

    I remember the days when you were lucky to find a tatty old bongo mag somewhere just outside the school grounds.....ahh them were the days.....when your biggest worry as a kid was the school bully.

    Mine's the one next to that zimmer frame.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ISK conversion...

    ...according to EVE-online, this should cost them about £3.04 if they buy 100mil ISK from Ebay; if I were them I'd have a think about seeing if the courts would accept a virtual currency.

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  4. User
    Thumb Down

    It wasnt a win for p2p

    SMAIS got its point through that "making available" is punishable, which really is a corruption of the law that states "distribute".

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  5. Slaine
    Paris Hilton

    2.5 TB?

    Illicit material... mmm??? that could be nothing more than a sizable collection of mp3's at 320bps, a modest 50 DVD images... or perhaps 2500 copies of "One night in Paris".

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  6. Michael
    Thumb Up

    A lot of porn?

    Not in these halcyon days of Hi-Def.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Re: 2.5TB

    -Slightly over 51 of the largest possible Blu-Ray images.

    -Close to 600 DVD-Rs

    -320 8GB iPhones (sorry!)

    Not *that* much these days - about 4 years ago, we had DC at Uni, and there were people on the hub with >3TB shared! Needless to say, the uni network admins were less than happy about the amount of bandwidth it was eating and shut it down pronto.

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  8. frank denton

    Full Judgement

    I had a look at the full judgement (In Icelandic) just to see what Icelandic looked like. I noticed that it listed what I assume is the equipment confiscated from each defendant. (This in great detail - Logitech Mouse, Viewsonic flatscreen etc).

    Was this a simple admin list of equipment the Iceplods had confiscated (you can get lots of movies stored inside a Logitech mouse as everyone knows) or was it presented as formal evidence of their guilt?

    I have an image in my mind of a hyped up junior prosecutor waving a Netgear switch around in front of the jury as part of his summing up speech - "See this!! do normal law-abiding citizens have this sort of thing in their house?"

    I'll hope for a native Icelander to advise on this (or a skilled reader of Icelandic).

    Further, will the confiscated equipment be returned to them, since like a car or a house or a knife, it is multi-purpose equipment which is readily available, for money, just about anywhere?

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  9. Paul
    Paris Hilton

    mmmmmmm.....

    2.5TB of porn :-)

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  10. Shabble

    Bandwidth

    On the one hand, these guys are sucking up bandwidth that could be used by people trying to watch 'Family Guy' clips on youtube. On the other hand, demand drives innovation and if it wasn't for P2P most European nations would probably still be stuck with 2Mbps max bandwidth anyway.

    The irony here is that most people who pay for the top bandwidth packages are doing so because of P2P. When Virgin upgrade everyone's bandwidth for free, its largely down to P2P filesharing. The downloaders may be cheating the recording industry, but they are subsidising the ISP industry.

    If we do see ISPs banning P2P traffic, your existing broadband bandwidth will be more likely to hit max... but it will be more expensive to upgrade in the future, and it will take longer for 100Mbps to be rolled out throughout the country.

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  11. Spleen

    Re: frank denton

    "Is this the sort of specialised network equipment you would expect your wife or servants to use?"

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  12. Slaine

    re: 320 8GB iPhones (sorry!)

    I accept... please don't do iT again.

    And yes - it was far too early for me to do anything other than take a wild guess for the numbers I used. It felt "about" right, it was a factor of 10 out - iBad. Perhaps I should have opted for statistics instead.

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  13. User
    Thumb Down

    The equipment.

    The equipment they owned was confiscated. That really was the sum of the punishment. Why mice and keyboards and such were taken by the police is beyond me.

    On the scale of Icelandic justice this was a pretty harsh judgement. You get smaller fines for aggravated assaults round here.

    Also, like I said before the major defeat for 21. century computing was that "making available" was made punishable. The law says otherwise, but in the future weak willed judges in Iceland are going to look back on this ruling for support.

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  14. Jón Frímann Jónsson
    Pirate

    It also says in the ruling

    The Smáís did use an guy that did share stuff, with permission from them in order to spy on them on the people how where sentenced by the court.

    The district court doesn't appear to have looked at that info. Even if the person in question (that was sharing and spying) did testify in court what it was doing. The thing is that it is illegal to do something that tricks people into breaking the law. But that was done in this case none the less. Today I don't think he is going to spy on anyone, as his ip range has been made public and I believe that it is now banned everywhere where there is an p2p site (torrent today).

    The people how got convicted are going to appeal to high court according to the news in Iceland.

    The person that did the spying is also connected to the istorrent case. But apparently he was doing the Smáís dirty job by collecting data on istorrent and forwarding them to Smáís. So they can start the sue things. I hope that this method gets under fire soon, as Smáís isn't a law force and private investigators are illegal in Iceland.

    Smáís is the evil hand of MPA/A here in Iceland.

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  15. Ash
    Dead Vulture

    ISK?

    My Rifter cost more than that fitted.

    A lot more.

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  16. Mectron
    Flame

    Smáís is just

    another branch of the Digital Mafia (RIAA/MPAA).

    The proof was obtained illegally (break and enter)

    a IP address on a log file is not even a proof, so the case was not even adimissble in court in the 1st place

    How many iceland movies was actually in the 2,5 tb?

    This is just another proof that the most dangerous criminal cartel in the world is still very active in it's never ending quest to steal more money from everyone and no country is safe from corruption.

    Note to Hacker:s The Pentagon might be a nice target, but if you want to be a Hero, the MPAA/RIAA is a much better "social" target then anything else

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  17. b166er

    Much ado

    According to Andrew Orlowski, Freetards are taking over, whilst in other news, Trent Reznor sold out of his £300 pound option in a little over a day, netting him around £750,000. The MPAA have posted a bumper year and admitted to cooking the books threefold in relation to the college file-sharing pandemic. Crikey, it certainly looks like these artists are soon to be destitute because of these freetards, eh ;p

    2.5TB, is that one empirical freetard?

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