Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know
Three executives behind top Taiwanese peer-to-peer firm Kuro were sentenced to prison on Friday in what is believed to be the world’s first criminal conviction for running an internet file-sharing service. One of the firm’s users was also given a jail sentence.
A Taipei Court on Friday convicted Kuro of criminal copyright infringement, imposing a fine of NT$3 million (approximately £50,000) on the firm for allowing subscribers to access digital files stored in other users' computers that were mostly in breach of copyright.
According to industry group the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), the files covered mostly local music, but no royalties were paid to the artists or the record labels.
Chen Kuo-hua and Chen Kuo-hsing, the brothers who ran Fashionow Co Ltd, the company behind Kuro, were sentenced to three years imprisonment each, while their father, Chen Shou-teng, who was president of Kuro, was given a two-year jail sentence.
A user of the site, Chen Chia-hui, was also convicted of uploading copyrighted material onto the service, according to the Taipei Times. She has been given a suspended sentence of four months in prison.
The judgment follows an earlier ruling by a Taiwanese court that Kuro’s smaller rival Ezpeer.com was not guilty of criminal copyright infringement for providing a similar file-swapping service.
The difference in this case, according to the IDG News Service, was that Kuro encouraged the copyright infringements through small adverts on its website.
"This is good news for artists and the music industry, particularly in Taiwan which has had a history of piracy problems. Kuro has received a criminal conviction which sends a strong message that profiteering from infringement will not be tolerated,” said Lauri Rechardt, Director of Licensing and Litigation for industry group the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.
