Torrent Sites Targeted Again By Authorities

In the last few years, the dispute between rights holders and BitTorrent users has become pretty quiet. But now there were two quite spectacular trials that hardly anyone expected.

One case followed the closure of the Danish torrent platform DanishBits. The authorities shut down the site together with the sister project Nordicbits last October. One of the operators was arrested in Morocco and extradited to Denmark, his partner was arrested in Spain. Then, of course, there was concern that other torrent sites would also be targeted – but things turned out differently.

This week, a 35-year-old man was charged who, according to the indictment, was merely a user of the platform. In the opinion of the authorities, however, he is not an occasional user, but a real intensive offender, as a report by the magazine TorrentFreak shows. Here is out of 2453 cases of Copyright infringement of the speech.

That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually not an unrealistic figure. Because the accused has obtained numerous series and audiobooks via the torrent platform, among other things, and here you quickly come across over a hundred episodes of a production. And if you don’t clean up your torrent client and hard drive regularly, you quickly share such a large amount with other users and are guilty of illegal distribution.

Prison sentence for private plex round

In another case, a user who used the torrent-based Plex server was convicted. This enables content to be streamed to a small group of users and serves, for example, as a media server for a family. The users do not have to be in the local network but can also access the videos via the Internet. That also happened in the case in question.

A total of just 21 users – mainly family members, but also a few friends – accessed the private offer via Plex. From a legal point of view, this still represents an illegal distribution of copyrighted material. The operator was then sentenced in Denmark to a suspended sentence of 30 days in prison.