Two More Danish Pirates Received Their Sentences in Court
Published on March 25, 2021
- Two Danish citizens have received sentences for illegal file-sharing via Plex and DanishBits.
- Another man extradited from Morocco is waiting for the trial to begin in Copenhagen.
- One more person linked to another defunct pirate site was arrested in Spain but passed away.
Only two months after the Danish police arrested the operators of “Asgaard” and “ShareUniversity,” touted as the last pirate sites in the country, we have two sentences of people who are linked to DanishBits and Plex piracy. DanishBits was a torrent tracker that was taken down back in October 2020, with no clear indication about what happened to its operators. We now know for sure that at least one of them was caught, and we may get to learn more about the others soon.
First, a 35-year-old man from Copenhagen, Denmark, who was closely linked with DanishBits, has been sentenced for sharing 9,440 movies with a small circle of family and friends (21 people) using the Plex media server. The man was running a NAS-server on a Mac Mini and shared the password with his friends and family via email.
Even though the person wasn’t doing this for profit, it is still considered unlawful file-sharing, and so he has received a sentence of 30 days probation. Moreover, he will have to cover legal proceedings costs and abide by a confidential settlement agreement with the rightsholders.
In the second case, we have another 35-year-old man from Odense, Denmark, who appears to be a prominent user of DanishBits. The court characterized his pirating activities as “considerable,” as there’s proof that he has uploaded 2,453 episodes of 69 TV series, 1,670 audiobooks, and 579 films.
The court decided to give the man a sentence of 60 days of conditional imprisonment and approve an undisclosed amount to be paid to rightsholders as compensation. This is considered relatively lenient, even though we don’t know the amounts of the reimbursement.
A third case concerns a 33-year-old who was extradited from Morocco and will have his case heard in the Copenhagen City Court soon. According to the Rights Alliance, that person is actually the ringleader of DanishBits, which can be stated with certainty even though the case is still being investigated. That person was imprisoned in Morocco in October 2020, so he has already spent some time in the cell.
Interestingly, the Danish Public Prosecutor’s office mentions another pirate too, a 69-year-old person who was staying in Spain and who is linked with another now-defunct pirating platform, “NordicBits.” That person was arrested in September 2020, admitted his involvement with the website, stopped the illegal sharing, but passed away before the case came to court as he was already seriously ill at the time of the charge.
