Finland - Prison Sentence For P2P Hub Operator

Washington, DC (Top40 Charts/ IFPI) - A Finnish District Court yesterday sentenced a peer-to-peer (P2P) hub operator to a four month suspended prison sentence. In addition the 33 year old man was ordered to pay ?307,450 in compensation to right holders. The offender had established a network with a number of DirectConnect (DC) hubs.

DC hubs are servers operated by one or more individuals using software to enable users of the DirectConnect P2P network to find and download files from other users connected to the same hub.
His computers were originally seized in June 2007 and were found to contain a significant amount of infringing music. He later restarted the hubs with new computers which were also seized in October 2007 and records showed that up to 2000 people had been using the hub, sharing around 80 terabytes of content (equivalent to 1.2 million albums).

CIAPC's Antti Kotilainen has welcomed the decision: "Imprisonment is the right penalty for this type of deliberate, planned and very harmful conduct in which the administrator facilitates widespread unauthorised file-sharing. "