SWEDISH MOVIE PIRATE ORDERED TO PAY $652,000

A Swedish man has received a suspended jail sentence and ordered to perform 160 hours of community service for uploading more than 500 movies to a BitTorrent site in 2011. But a tougher part of the sentence is that he must pay the producer of one Swedish film $652,000, the amount it says it would have charged for a license to distribute the movie. As reported by TorrentFreak.com, which tracks BitTorrent usage, the man, who was not named in the article, was hunted down by a group that now calls itself Rights Alliance. Henrik Pontén, a lawyer for the group, said that the damages award was the largest ever ordered for a Swedish movie. But a member of Sweden’s Pirate Party, Gustav Nipe, observed that the damage award exceeds the $150,000 per title possible under U.S. statutes. “To receive such a harsh penalty for doing something carried out by millions of Swedes shows how outdated our legislation is,” said Nipe.