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Legal
Operators of former Finnish BitTorrent site ordered to pay damages
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 5 July 2010
The operators of a long defunct Finnish BitTorrent site called Finreactor have been ordered to pay 680,000 euros to various copyright owners as compensation for the file-sharing their website enabled.
The legal case against the seven people who created and ran Finreactor has been very drawn out, the site went off line in 2004 after a police raid seized a number of its servers. The legal action, instigated by a complaint by software companies Microsoft and Adobe, only reached its conclusion last week, with the defendants being found liable for infringement and the mega-bucks damages. It is not clear if the damages will go just to the companies who instigated the 2004 raid, or more widely to other companies whose content or software was illegally shared via the service.
According to TorrentFreak, 24 users of the service were also targeted by the authorities with charges of copyright crimes, with all but one found guilty and ordered to pay damages of several thousand euros.
