WeiZhong’s Blog

A 16-year-old from Stavanger has become the first Norwegian charged with illegal file-sharing for distributing copyright protected material via the Internet.

Police in Rogaland aim to get the accused a suspended sentence of 60 days in jail and a fine of NOK 4,000 (USD 644). In addition the boy’s parents face a six-figure fine for compensation from the music and film industry, newspaper Dagbladet reports on its web site.

“We are very pleased that the police have taken charge and will punish the person behind it. This sends a signal that this kind of operation is illegal,” Roald Dye, secretary general of the Norwegian Videogram Association, told Dagbladet.

“This boy must answer for his conscious actions. He was fully aware that this is illegal. The case is also a powerful signal to parents – they must pay more attention to what their children are doing,” Marte Thorsby of the recording industry organization IFPI told Dagbladet.

The boy is charged with running the network known as the Stavanger Dragon Hub in the file-sharing program Direct Connect, and administering the sharing of 7,000 films, 150,000 songs and 20,000 video clips.

“We will calculate how much music and how many films were shared, how many copies are distributed and the value of this. We may demand compensation in a civil suit after the criminal case. It can quickly work out to a six-figure sum,” said lawyer Espen Tøndel.

This article can be found here.

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My Thoughts and Opinions
In the modern world of the twenty-first century, almost every household has a computer and almost every house which has a computer has internet access.There are also many temptations in life. But all temptations have a root cause… which is the invention of MONEY. In the modern world, everything costs money. In this case, the music and films are worth money, so by distributing them illegally, he committed a crime.Music and videos are hot amongst teenagers around the world. Given their popularity, and being sufficiently tech savvy, one would definitely be tempted to obtain it in a tech sort of way, which in this case now, is peer to peer file sharing!

As a teen myself, I myself have surfed the net widely and am sufficiently tech savvy too. I have observed many such cases online too. Some very good examples are currently the hottest way of file sharing, like free file hosts, paid file hosts, and torrents! By far, torrents have been observed to be the most widely used form of illegal file sharing so far… This is mainly because of the convenience which is provided. When sharing files via torrent, not much information is required to be given into your profile, thus your information is rather discrete. With much secretiveness, you can share your files via torrents with a very low risk of getting caught. What’s more, the file sharing is yet extensive in a way but from the outside look, it doesn’t look extensive at all!

Another obvious source of illegal file sharing is RapidShare. Through a rather short period of time, RapidShare grew on the internet very quickly and gathered their userbase very quickly too. They offer very good paid services but very lousy free services. Thus, with the already humongous and growing popularity of RapidShare, many different types of legal material are hosted there by paid users. What I don’t get, is why the police aren’t doing anything about these cases? They are sharing illegal material in broad daylight which is totally equivalent to daylight robbery and the police are still keeping mum!

As a webmaster of a website myself, I always make it a point to make sure I have no hand in any illegal activities and I also make sure my website userbase does nothing of the sort. My advice to fellow webmasters in this matter is to put up a legal disclaimer on their site saying that they are in no way responsible for anything the user does with their computer on their website. This way, webmasters would be safe from suing attempts at them for things they did not commit.