The ‘Rights Alliance’ Boasts Bashing Piracy in Denmark

• The last two big Danish pirate sites have gone offline voluntarily, following the arrests and prosecution of their peers.
• The ‘Rights Alliance’ declares victory for this achievement, as the group was working on this for over a decade.
• The focus now shifts to smaller players, P2P users, and rising platforms that will attempt to offer alternatives.

The anti-piracy group known as ‘Rights Alliance’ (Rettighedsalliancen) is boldly claiming that piracy in Denmark is dead and that they are to congratulate for that. As they claim, their focus shifts entirely on new-comers, as there are no existing and large enough pirate sites to target in the country anymore.

The last two illegal services that were pending closure were “Asgaard” and “ShareUniversity,” and with both of them gone now, it is the end of the story. As the organization states, it took them over a decade to achieve this feat, but they are finally in a position to declare victory.

We have previously covered the action of the particular anti-piracy group, and with every success that they had in the courts, people moved elsewhere. Soon, the platforms to host illegal content thinned out in number, and that left grew too big to be able to continue flying under the radar.

The case of Asgaard was one of these, ending up having 1.5 million unique visitors in November 2020 and creating a library containing 18,000 files, including books, movies, and even news articles from subscription-based news outlets. Asgaard shut down on its own right before Christmas, when it felt the Rights Alliance legal team approaching.

This left “ShareUniversity” as the only carrier of the pirate flag in Denmark, but this only lasted for about a day or so. Seeing everyone else in the field arrested and prosecuted was enough for them to give up voluntarily, hoping to avoid the consequences of running an illegal file-sharing service.

Now, the Rights Alliance knows that users haven’t disappeared and believes that other platforms will attempt to offer alternative paths to piracy. Therefore, they will now monitor the net and focus more on highly-active and prolific P2P users. Torrent users need to get the message that sharing or downloading copyright-protected content with others is illegal and can have serious legal consequences.

Of course, Danish pirates may just use foreign platforms and services, hide behind VPN connections, or find what they’re looking for on the dark web. The problem for them is that easy to use repositories of ‘local’ content are all gone, so if it is Danish-specific content they’re after, they may have run out of luck now. In that sense, the ‘Rights Alliance’ has won, for now.