Helsinki, 19th June 2008
12 operators of the Finreactor peer-to-peer-network were convicted today by the Turku Court of Appeal in Finland. Finreactor was a BitTorrent network that had 10,000 registered users. The National Bureau of Investigation Finland raided the site in December 2004. District Court of Turku convicted in October 2006 fourteen operators for copyright offences and seven for aiding for copyright offences. The operators were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control. The convicted defendants were ordered to pay compensation, damages and expenses of €566,000 to the right holders.

Out of 21 convicted, fourteen appealed to Court of Appeal. Seven convicted made voluntarily settlements with the copyright holders after District Court ruling. The Turku Court of Appeal held today in most relevant parts the ruling of the lower court. Two persons were found not guilty as their role as operators were seen less significant.
The Court of Appeal convicted the defendants on grounds that they were aware that nearly all the material made available by the service was infringing and that they had acted wilfully. The court held that the purpose of the network was to share as much new infringing content to its users as possible. Users of the network were required to maintain a minimum ratio of uploaded to downloaded content in order to maintain their accounts.
The court rejected the convicteds claim that as operators of the service they were not responsible of the infringement since the content was transferred directly between the users and no infringing content was either stored or transferred through the tracker, i.e. that the centralised part of the service run by the operators should be regarded as simply linking. The court stated that operators were fully aware of the fact, that illegal copying was taking place between the users of Finreactor network. The Court of Appeal confirmed, that the convicted defendants were directly and essentially involved in the illegal making available and reproduction of copyright protected works by the users of the service.
The convicted also claimed that the Finreactor networks should have been seen merely as a hosting service provider according to E-commerce directive article 14. The convicted argued, that since the right holders had not provided them with proper notice & takedown notifications concerning possible illegal torrent files hosted by the Finreactor network, they had no civil or criminal responsibility what so ever. For this the Court of Appeal stated, that the operators of the service were directly involved in the illegal activity and could not therefore benefit from any liability exemption.
During three months in late 2004 29,625 terabytes of data were shared through the service, which is equal to 450,000 CD-Roms of data. The vast majority of the content shared was music, movies, software and games. The amount of data shared in these categories, calculated by usual file sizes, show that the users of the Finreactor downloaded nearly 16,000 games, 136,000 movies and 274 000 music albums from the service. This estimate is based on completed downloads only.