This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Legal
Belfast courts hand down suspended sentences to file-sharing site operators
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 20 December 2013
Two men have received suspended sentences in the Belfast Crown Court for their involvement in running a file-sharing operation called Araditracker, which was mainly known for providing unlicensed access to movies and software. The case confirms that, under UK law, there can be a criminal element to the operation of a profit-generating online platform that enables others to infringe copyright.
Hugh Reid and Marcus Lewis, a father and son-in-law now based in Belfast and Suffolk respectively, took donations for about a year from people who used Araditracker to access free music, movie and software files. In late 2007 the film industry’s Federation Against Copyright Theft took action, forcing Araditracker offline, though Reid and Lewis quickly set up an alternative service.
That led to Reid’s Belfast home being raided in August 2008, and a second raid of Lewis’s home, then in North Wales, three months later. Prosecutors said that they secured a range of evidence to prove the two men’s involvement in the file-sharing operation, which Reid seemingly first set up when his radiator business hit the hard times in 2006.
The two men pleaded guilty to the infringement crimes, which the judge hearing the case described as “nothing less than theft”, adding to the two men “you must have known from an early stage that this was criminal behaviour”.
According to Belfast Daily, the judge added: “There are people who work here locally making films, both in this jurisdiction and elsewhere, as well as the people who work in cinemas and in DVD distribution. These are the people who are all affected by your copyright infringements”.
A confiscation hearing will now take place, with prosecutors seeking to recover £33,000 from Reid. His defence team said their client “had the means” to settle that matter.
The Belfast ruling follows a judgement in the Swedish courts earlier this week, where a former moderator of file-sharing site Swebits received a suspended sentence and was fined a massive $652,000 for sharing over 500 movies and TV shows on the site.
