It appears that Sweden plans to punish convicted filesharers with more reasonable fines than we're used to seeing in the US. TorrentFreak reports that a Swedish court has found a 26-year-old Uppsala man guilty of illegally sharing 44 music tracks online and he faces a fine of 2000 kronor, which equates to roughly $311 or $7 per song.
By comparison, a US court ordered Jammie Thomas-Rasset to pay $1.5 million in damages in 2010 for illegally sharing 24 songs, or an absurd $62,500 per file. In a lesser-known case, Joel Tenenbaum was slammed with a fee of $67,500 for sharing 31 songs, and that sum was reduced from the jury's damage assessment of $675,000.
It's said that the Swedish judge initially requested the unnamed man pay around $45 per song which would have worked out to roughly $1,980, but that was eventually lowered. "Swedish courts may be slowly coming to their senses regarding non-commercial violations of the copyright monopoly," said Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge.
"The verdict is in stark contrast to the political verdict in the Pirate Bay trial, where four people were sentenced to long prison sentences and paying €3,500,000 for merely aiding in possibly sharing 33 works," he continued. Do you think Sweden's ruling will set precedence for future filesharing cases across Europe and the US?