The International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry has welcomed a ruling in Finland that will see a man who sold pirated karaoke records over the internet face a suspended custodial sentence and significant fine. The Swedish man who sold the pirated material has been given a 30 day suspended prison sentence by the Finnish courts for copyright offences. He will also have to pay 70,000 euros in compensation, damages and expenses to the rights holders. Although based in Sweden, the man sold the pirated material via a website and magazine adverts in Finland, and was caught via an operation led by Finnish authorities with the support of the Swedish police.
The ruling comes a week after that other European court ruling that seemingly went against the recording industry in their fight against piracy. As previously reported, in that case a Spanish man who downloaded music via P2P networks and then offered to mail CDR copies to people via various message boards was acquitted because the judge ruled the defendant was not profiting from the distribution of the music and therefore was covered by Spanish copyright laws that allow the making of 'private copies'. Although the IFPI disagree with that ruling, a spokesman for the trade association has said that the ruling is not, as some media suggested, a landmark case regarding the legal battle against the unapproved sharing of music online.
IFPI's Adrian Strain told Digital Music News that while "the judge, wrongly in our view, defined the distribution of the music CD-Rs as 'private copying' on the grounds there was no profit involved", this judgement is very much concerned with the specifics of the case - ie the burning and distributing, of CD-Rs - and as a result: "The case had absolutely nothing to do with internet file-sharing".