"There are of course different laws in different countries but
it seems like we should be able to expand into the Nordic countries
at least in the not too distant future," Brath said. "It's a very
small company at the moment and we don't have the resources to get
out into Europe fast but we're looking into it.
The company, Tankafritt, was launched this week and Brath is
currently the owner and sole employee. It operates on a membership
basis "Our customers pay us 140 K which is about £10 and they get
to be a member for a year and then if they get sued for file
sharing we will pay their fines if they get any," said Brath. "We
should be able to pay every fine in the future."
Brath said that a legal precedent for such a scheme already
exists and that schemes exist to pay speeding ticket fines in
Sweden.
The company has been set up as a reaction and protest to recent
changes in Swedish copyright law. Sweden used to have relatively
lax copyright laws but they were tightened last summer. Though
uploading copyrighted material had always been against the law,
downloading such material was only made an offence for the first
time last summer.
"The file sharing laws are quite recent in Sweden and there's
been a lot of debating and politics around this issue," said Brath.
"We wanted to make a statement to say that we don't like the new
laws and we want to change back to the way they used to be."
Brath would not reveal how many members had joined the scheme in
its first week, saying that the secrecy of the list was paramount.
He did say that he was confident that the scheme could meet the
cost of any future payouts.
Such a scheme would be unlikely to be legal in the UK, said the
Association of British Insurers. A spokeswoman said that English
common law would not uphold a contract concerning illegal
activity.
The cause of file sharers is a celebrated one in Sweden, where
there is a political party devoted to the relaxation of
intellectual property controls. A recent raid on server farms
hosting the Pirate Bay site caused controversy, particularly since
the raid appeared to have taken legal businesses offline as well as
the Pirate Bay. Pirate Bay insist that their site, which hosts only
links to copyrighted material, is legal.
As well as the costs of any finding against a member, Brath is
also offering each prosecuted member a t-shirt. "Translated, it
reads' I got convicted for file sharing and all I got was this
lousy t-shirt," he said.
Meanwhile file sharing news site Slyck.com has used prosecution
data to calculate that the chances of being sued by industry body
the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing are
1,840 to one, which are longer odds than dying from an intentional
or non intentional injury in the US, the site reported.
