SuperBits and DanishBytes Torrent Uploader and ‘The Scene’-Linked Man Sentenced to Prison in Denmark

• Two individuals were sentenced to prison in Denmark for illegal online file-sharing.
• One got nine months, while the other got 12, even though there was no financial gain involved.
• The severity of these sentences was due to the massive scale of copyrighted material unlawfully shared.

Danish law enforcement and rightsholder pressure resulted in two landmark prison sentences involving significant copyright violations in file-sharing cases. Both sentences include unconditional prison time, even for one of the cases where there are no criminal records and financial profit motives.

A 46-year-old man was sentenced to nine months in prison, with three months to be served unconditionally for his involvement in uploading copyrighted material via the torrent trackers SuperBits and DanishBytes. 

Alongside his prison sentence, the man was assigned 120 hours of community service. Over a period of activity, he shared an enormous 74 terabytes of pirated films and TV series. 

The other individual, a 48-year-old man, got to 12 months in prison, with four months being unconditional. The man was convicted of hosting two servers and distributing content illegally copied from streaming services for the elite network "The Scene." His activity targeted a range of content, including Danish children's series and dubbed films.

The National Unit for Special Crime (NSK) revealed that this individual had amassed 134 terabytes of copyrighted material. The conviction stems from the defendant's sustained illegal activities from November 2021 until his arrest in November 2023, which has disrupted several Danish Scene groups, including the children’s content distributor "DKiDS."

The Danish crackdown on The Scene reportedly resulted in more arrests, and two additional cases are currently awaiting court hearings.