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A man who shared copies of more than a thousand e-books and articles obtained from a paid news site has been given a six-month suspended sentence by a court in Denmark. Prosecutions for paid item sharing are extremely rare, but in this case they are backed by a long list of additional crimes including fraud and movie piracy.
Following Denmark's crackdown on piracy and the largest torrent sites shut down as part of a joint Rights Alliance-police operation, content-hungry pirates spread out to find new homes.
With danish bits and nordic bits relegated to history, many ended up on Asgaard, a relatively young private members site happy to accept new members.
Opening up under these circumstances was a bold but risky move. Within weeks, the site's operators belatedly came to the same conclusion and decided to shut down before things got out of hand. It was already too late; multiple arrests, a series of indictments and various convictions Following.
The anti-piracy group Rights Alliance is now reporting details of another Asgaard-related conviction.
Sharing pirated ebooks and paid articles
Asgardian Announced its closure in mid-December 2020, but that didn't stop at least one of the site's employees from spending christmas in jail.
The announcement also failed to prevent the Rights Alliance and the Danish police from investigating crimes that occurred months before Asgaard offered to accept new members. Or, indeed, offenses that took place even after the closure of Asgaard.
According to Rights Alliance, a member of Asgaard was also part of a hacking release group known as 'Xoro6'. Between July and December 2020, the now 41-year-old man from Funen illegally copied and shared more than 1,000 e-books, audiobooks, newspaper and magazine articles with other Asgaard users.
Around 85 of the articles were obtained from a payment service operated by the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet. The anti-piracy group says the man accessed the platform using credentials belonging to legitimate subscribers to the service.
Six-month suspended prison sentence
On June 22, 2023, at Odense Court, the former Asgaard member was given a six-month suspended sentence for sharing e-books and paid items obtained using the credentials of unsuspecting Ekstra Bladet+ subscribers. But that was not all.
โThe 41-year-old man was also convicted of eight counts of online shopping fraud,โ adds a statement from Denmark's National Special Crimes Unit (NSK).
โHere, he had falsely claimed to the sellers that he had not received the goods or had returned the goods. Therefore, he unreasonably got his money back.โ
Rights Alliance says the man defrauded online stores to the tune of DKK 17,229 ($2,524), but his offense did not stop there.
Plex Server Subscriptions
The man was reported to the authorities in January 2021 for the crimes of sharing articles and e-books, but despite the closure of Asgaard, infringements of other types of media continued.
โThen he got involved in running a Plex server where at least 3468 movies and series were made available to paying customers. A relationship for which he was also convicted in court, โsays Rights Alliance.
โHere I was responsible for advertising the Plex server on platforms such as Discord and also for the registration, payment and orientation of the clients of the service, who could buy access to the server for DKK 100 [US$15] per month."
the slippery slope
โThis is not the first time we have seen cases like this, where the illegal sharing of creative content easily becomes a criminal slippery slope to more serious crimes,โ says Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund.
โTherefore, it is important to intervene early, to prevent rights holders, as well as general consumers and businesses, from being exposed to a wide range of criminal acts.โ
In addition to his suspended sentence, the man was also ordered to pay compensation of DKK 41,715 (US$6,111) to Rights Alliance. Given the level of crime and aggravating factors, that's not much compared to similar cases elsewhere. However, NSK's deputy prosecutor, Brian Borgstrรธm, says the result is acceptable.
โI am pleased with the verdict, which emphasizes that organized and systematic copyright infringement is a form of crime that is taken seriously by the authorities,โ concludes Borgstrรธm.
