A group of music labels currently taking action against The Pirate Bay in Finland have pulled off something anti-piracy groups in other countries have been dreaming of. Following file-sharing complaints filed earlier this year, a court has now issued orders for the ISPs of three subscribers to disconnect them from the Internet.
In May, news broke that a group of record labels had initiated steps to have The Pirate Bay censored in Finland. The Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the local branch of the IFPI announced that they had filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.
The legal action targeted Elisa, one of the largest ISPs in Finland, demanding that the Internet provider stops providing subscriber access to The Pirate Bay.
While the result in that case is yet to be decided, CIAPC have just pulled off quite a victory in their battle against illicit file-sharing.
During the course of their online anti-piracy monitoring, CIAPC discovered five Internet connections which were making available thousands of music tracks on file-sharing networks. According to the group, in all cases the file-sharer was either an actual Internet subscriber or a family member of a subscriber.
CIAPC took the information to court looking for an order to prevent the individuals continuing with their activities. Now, under Section 60c of Finland’s Copyright Act, a court has granted CIAPC injunctions in three of the cases.
What this means is without the sending of a so-called “first strike” letter, the respective ISPs of the subscribers in question are now required to completely disconnect their infringing customers from the Internet.
“This has not happened in Finland before nor did we expect it to happen,” says Joonas Mäkinen of the Pirate Party of Finland.
Mäkinen told TorrentFreak this morning that legal sanctions available to rightsholders should always be proportionate and that these disconnections overstep the mark.
“This is indeed a worrisome addition to the anti-piracy arsenal. It seems that lately politicians and legal procedures alike have been more focused on how civil rights can be restricted rather than how they can be protected. There shouldn’t even exist anything in the legislation that allows such a limitation to people’s right to communicate,” says Mäkinen.