14 DAY TRIAL // While US officials are bent on taking a hard stance against illegal file sharing, with courts awarding millions in damages left and right for a handful of shared songs, other countries are more lenient and have more proportionate penalty systems. As such, a man in Finland found guilty of sharing music online was ordered to pay a €3,000 – about $4,230 – fine. He filed an appeal but it was rejected with the Helsinki Court of Appeal upholding the initial decision.
The man was charged with sharing 768 MB worth of music over a file-sharing network and, in February 2008, the Porvoo District Court found him guilty of copyright infringement and forced him to pay around €3,000 in fines. Several sources claim he was sharing 164 albums but some simple arithmetic shows that this would come in at less than 5 MB per album. Either the man was using some revolutionary compression algorithm or, more likely, the 164 albums’ worth of music refers to the 1,850 illegally downloaded tracks the police also found on his computer. Then again, the shared tracks could have been MIDI files.
Still, it was a pretty much open-and-shut case and the court's decision wasn't a hard one. The man though disagreed, claiming that, while he was aware that file sharing was being done on his computer, he didn't know who was doing it. He held this claim in court too, filing for an appeal that, unsurprisingly, didn't stand. The court stood by the initial decision and he now has to come up with the €3,000.
Not exactly a bargain, but a far cry from the millions awarded in damages in the US. Two cases made the headlines recently, with a single mom having to pay $1.92 million to the RIAA for sharing 24 songs, while a Boston student was ordered to pay $675,000 for 30, decisions that the US Department of Justice finds not only constitutional but fair.