Court of Appeal Convicts File-Sharer

Found on FreakBits on Sunday, 16 August 2009
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The punishment stands at 3,000 euros for sharing more than 150 albums.

The man from Finland was earlier accused of sharing music files totaling 768Mb on the Internet - around 164 albums. A search of his computer turned up 1,850 tracks which had been downloaded from unauthorized sources.

That's Finland for you. In the US, he would have ended up with $148 million - remember that Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $1.92 million for making only 24 songs available; that's an impressive $80,000 per song. The finnish court went down a bit there, settling at $2.30 per song, which seems by far more reasonable in times of $0.99 songs. Such a ruling in the US would make it pointless for the industry to sue consumers and force it to think about a new business model.