Mediavision has been tracking citizens’ piracy habits across the Nordic countries since 2010. The company’s annual report for Spring 2023, based on a survey conducted in March, has just been released.

With Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway under the spotlight once again, Mediavision’s pan-Nordic consumer survey aims to measure unlicensed content consumption among 15 to 74-year-old respondents, across categories including movies and TV shows, and access to both via pirate IPTV services.

Overall Piracy Rates Increase

With no obviously positive news to distract, poor figures across all four countries take center stage.

Denmark, a country with an overall movie and TV show piracy rate of 11% in 2014, now has an overall rate of 20%, up from the 13% reported in Mediavision’s survey in 2022.

With an overall rate of just 8% in 2014, increases over the years led to a 13% overall rate for Finland in 2022. A four point rise over the past 12 months pushes Finland’s overall movie and TV show piracy rate to 17%.

Since 2014, overall unlicensed consumption of movies and TV shows, in both Norway and Sweden, adopted a broadly U-shaped curve. With reducing piracy rates indicating signs of progress in the middle, high rates of piracy seen in 2014 are back on display in 2022, and then some.

Overall movie and TV show piracy rates for Norway now stand at 22% versus 18% last year, with Sweden at 25% and 20% respectively. Mediavision reports that in all four countries, the usual suspects are driving the increases.

Young People Push Up Piracy

Technologically adept and hungry for content, young people often make a disproportionate contribution to piracy rates. Through various programs, rightsholders have reached out to kids of all ages, hoping to encourage negative attitudes towards piracy from an early stage.

From kindergarten copyright classes in the United States, to a current project in Denmark that will pay teens to assist with piracy research, most things have been tried.

Mediavision’s latest study reveals that piracy increases are being driven by young people in the 15 to 24-year-old group, across all four countries. The concern for rightsholders lies in piracy’s monthly reach, which was unacceptably high last year and is now considerably worse.

According to last year’s report, 29% of young Danes engaged in movie and/or TV show piracy. The latest figures show a leap to 46%, a figure that puts Denmark on equal footing with Finland, where rates rose to 46% from the 27% reported last year.

Norway’s increase, from 38% last year to 51% this year, is slightly less steep, leaving Sweden with the surprise upper hand.

The eight percentage point increase attributed to young Swedes in this year’s survey is less than any of its regional neighbours. Unfortunately, Sweden’s last set of results in 2022 indicated that 45% of its young people engaged with piracy, a figure that has now risen to 53%. That suggests that every second young person in Sweden today is a pirate

Access to Pirate IPTV Services

Mediavision’s Spring 2022 survey found that across Sweden, Denmark, Finland & Norway, just under 0.9 million households subscribed to an illegal IPTV service.

With the largest population, Sweden accounted for more than 40% (380,000) of IPTV-equipped households across the region. With 230,000 subscribed homes, Norway was runner-up, with Finland (155,000) and Denmark (125,000) taking the remaining spots. Taking population into account, Norway’s 10% share beat Sweden’s 9% into second place.

Following the release of these figures last year, entertainment companies warned that use of pirate IPTV services was on the increase in the Nordic region. According to the latest survey, the prediction was spot on.

The latest figure of 1,150,000 households represents a 29% increase over the 890,000 households reported in 2022. With 490,000 and 255,000 households respectively, Sweden and Norway are the leading consumers of IPTV by volume, pushing Denmark (220,000) and Finland (190,000) into third and fourth place. By share, Sweden and Norway tie with 11% each, leaving Denmark (9%) and Finland (7%) to complete the set.

And Now The Good News

In contrast to the gloomy picture painted by the latest survey, other recent reports published by Mediavision signal positive trends in legal content consumption.

“Online video in Finland is on the rise. During this spring, subscribing SVOD households have passed 1.5 million, corresponding to a penetration of 61 percent. This equals an annual growth of 8 percent in subscribing households,” the company notes .

In Sweden, where piracy habits are on the rise, legal consumption is going in the same direction.

“Today, over 90 percent of households in Sweden pay for some form of media subscription,” another Mediavision report begins. Despite rising interest rates, inflation and increased financial anxiety, there is no sign of a slowdown in paid media.

“On the contrary, Mediavision’s latest analysis measures a new record level for households’ total media expenditure. Households pay the most for TV and streaming subscriptions,” Mediavision reports .

Denmark’s situation also appears less gloomy than its piracy rates suggest. After adding half a million in 2022, there are now over four million paid VOD subscriptions in Denmark, from a total population of less than six million.

Mediavision also notes that around three million subscriptions in the Nordics are shared accounts, paid for by the subscriber but enjoyed for free by others. With further sharing crackdowns looming on the horizon, the question is whether legal platforms or pirate sites stand to reap the most benefits.

Mediavision’s Nordic Piracy Report 2023 is available from TTVK ( pdf )

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Right-wing NCP and nationalist Finns pull narrowly ahead of ruling Social Democrats with 96% of votes counted

Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, has lost her battle to stay in power after her centre-left Social Democratic party (SDP) was narrowly beaten into third place in a cliffhanger election by its conservative and far-right rivals.

With 96% of votes counted on Sunday, the right-wing National Coalition party was on course to secure 20.7% of the vote, with the populist, nation-first Finns party predicted to score 20.1%. Marin’s SDP was forecast to collect 19.9%. Marin conceded defeat shortly after those figures were released.

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Polls have PM Sanna Marin’s Social Democrats narrowly trailing both conservative NCP and far-right Finns party

Polling stations have opened in a knife-edge election in Finland, with polls suggesting the three leading parties are running neck-and-neck and prime minister Sanna Marin may face an uphill battle to stay in power.

A final poll for public broadcaster Yle – with a margin of error of two percentage points – put the conservative National Coalition party (NCP) on 19.8%, the far-right, nationalist Finns party on 19.5%, and Marin’s Social Democrats (SDP) on 18.7%.

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More than eight years ago, internet subscribers in Finland began receiving letters claiming that they owed hundreds of euros to companies they’d never heard of.

The letters, sent by the law firm Hedman Partners, alleged that subscribers’ internet connections had been used to download or share movies (some pornographic) using BitTorrent. Alleged pirates were given a choice – pay a substantial settlement amount to the rightsholders or face punishing legal action. This controversial business model would occupy Finland’s legal system for years to come.

Thousands of settlement letters, demanding between 600 and 3,000 euros per offense, targeted account holders, with some cases going to court. In 2015, the chief judge at Finland’s Market Court questioned whether the system had the resources to cope but that didn’t deter those seeking to turn piracy into profit.

Initial Victory For Internet Subscribers

Three years after internet subscribers first began receiving settlement demands, a case before the Market Court cast doubt on the future of cash settlement factories in Finland.

Filmmakers had requested the personal details of hundreds of alleged BitTorrent users from local ISP DNA, so they too could be sent demands for cash. According to Section 60a of Finland’s Copyright Act, rightsholders are entitled to obtain a subscriber’s details if they make content available to the public “to a significant extent.”

In this case, the filmmakers’ did provide evidence of infringement but failed to show how serious those infringements actually were – the amount of data transferred or incidences of repeat infringement, for example.

As a result, the Court decided that when balancing the defendants’ privacy rights against those of the filmmakers, the failure of the applicants to meet the criteria in Article 60a meant that the application for disclosure should be dismissed .

Rightsholders Refuse to Give Up

In January 2020, media company Scanbox Entertainment filed an application at the Market Court again seeking subscriber details from DNA relating to 34 subscribers. This time it provided additional evidence including the size of the ‘swarm’ (# of people sharing) to which subscribers connected, the size of all swarms where the same content was being shared, plus evidence of ‘test pieces’ downloaded.

The ISP objected, claiming that Section 60a could not be applied; none of the subscribers identified in the application had made the copyrighted material available to the public to a significant extent, as required by law. In some cases, DNA said, alleged infringers had only made content available for a few minutes – seconds in others.

The Market Court ruled that the subscribers should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Ultimately it was determined that the threshold for “significant infringement” had been met in five cases – users who shared movies for several days and/or long periods of time repeatedly.

The Court ordered DNA to hand over the details of those customers to Scanbox and, by extension, a network of movie companies all over Europe and the United States.

Supreme Court Hears Appeal

After both sides were granted permission to appeal, DNA filed a request for the Market Court’s decision to be overturned and for Scanbox’s appeal to be dismissed. Scanbox responded by demanding that DNA’s appeal should be dismissed and the Market Court’s ruling should be annulled and then applied against all subscribers.

The Supreme Court conducted a detailed analysis of the application, including whether the sharing allegedly carried out by the 34 subscribers meets the threshold required under law.

The Supreme Court’s Key Findings:

– In order to prove that [copyrighted content] has been made available to the public, it is not necessary to prove that the relevant user has first downloaded from the network a number of parts of the file representing a certain de minimis threshold value.

– By downloading and installing a separate program that is a prerequisite for using BitTorrent technology, users are aware of the program’s features and have given their consent to use the program. In this regard, the fact that the file containing the work can be downloaded automatically and in very small parts is not important.

– The European Court of Justice has given importance to the large number of IP addresses connected to the network when assessing whether a significant number of persons use a peer-to-peer network using BitTorrent technology.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has also considered it relevant when interpreting the concept of making available to the public that there is an unlimited number of potential recipients and that there is quite a significant number of persons.

– Based on the report presented in the case, BitTorrent users have practically no opportunity to influence in which swarm they share the work and how many users are attached to this swarm. The number of users of the swarm can be considered to indicate the total number of persons who directly participated in the sharing and downloading of a certain work at a certain moment.

– Based on the report presented in the case, an internet subscriber cannot be surprised by the fact that the downloadable work can be downloaded by other users at the same time when BitTorrent is used.

– The disclosure of the subscriber information in question is in accordance with the goal of achieving a fair balance between the copyright holder’s right to access information and the privacy protection of internet users.

“The Supreme Court, based on the above-mentioned grounds, considers that [DNA] must be ordered to hand over to [the rightsholders], in addition to what is ordered by the Market Court, the user’s and subscriber’s contact information also from those telecom subscriptions for which the Market Court has rejected the application,” the decision concludes.

In short, all 34 subscribers met the threshold for significant infringement and will have their details passed on to the rightsholders. It is likely that all will receive demands for cash settlements in the near future and that more applications will be filed by rightsholders now they have a green light.

The only remaining questions relate to the scale of the operation and how aggressively it will be pursued.

The Supreme Court decision can be found here

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Most copyright infringement lawsuits filed by the recording industry are aimed at sites, services and individuals involved in the unlicensed online distribution of music.

A case that has just wrapped in Finland touches on an interesting aspect of EU copyright law in respect of simply linking to official broadcasting streams and also a key component of millions of songs – lyrics.

Man Operated Unlicensed Sites For Seven Years

Between 2013 and 2020, a man from Finland operated three websites – lyrics.fi, lyricsfi.com and nettiradio.fi. The first two sites were focused on lyrics for popular songs and had their databases populated by the site operator and the platforms’ users who submitted lyrics for editing and subsequent publishing. During the operating period the 37-year-old man (who isn’t named by the court) did not seek permission from copyright holders to reproduce and distribute lyrics.

The latter site, nettiradio.fi, operated as an internet radio portal. The platform allowed users to listen to the live internet broadcasts of 109 local radio channels via embedded links. These channels were not ‘pirated’ in the traditional sense, since they linked directly to the original source URLs on the broadcasters’ websites. However, visits to the defendants’ websites generated significant revenue – almost 300,000 euros according to the court.

Recording Industry Takes Action

Claims were filed against the man by 15 music and media companies including Warner Music Finland, Universal Music Publishing, Bauer Media, and Sanoma Media Finland. They believed their rights in lyrics and broadcasts had been infringed via the man’s sites and for this they demanded compensation.

The complaint noted that rightsholders had previously written to the man alleging infringement and advising on relevant terms of use for their content. However, this did not yield the desired results and the man and his sites continued regardless. The man refused to admit guilt and the matter was heard by a panel of three judges over three days in January 2022.

Court Finds Man Guilty of Copyright Infringment

Late last week the Länsi-Uusimaa District Court announced that the operator of the sites had been found guilty of copyright infringement. He was handed a suspended six-month prison sentence and ordered to pay 250,000 euros in compensation to the music and media companies.

In respect of the two sites distributing copyrighted lyrics, the Court found that the man was unable to rely on the type of limited liability protection available to online service providers due to his deeper involvement in reproduction and distribution.

“[T]he man had maintained his websites specializing in music lyrics in such a way that, among other things, he had been actively involved in editing the material and moderating the activities of the sites. Accordingly, the District Court held that the man had not merely acted as a platform service provider,” the Court notes.

Embedding Radio Broadcast Links Breached Copyright Law

As highlighted earlier, the audio streams made available by the defendant on his radio portal were not copied or duplicated in any way. The links to the streams were embedded in his site and linked directly to the original sources. Importantly, the original broadcast links were also published on open websites and were not restricted to registered or subscription customers.

This means that, under EU law, the defendant did not make the copyrighted content available to a ‘new audience’, something that many big copyright cases reference when determining liability for infringement. However, that does not mean that framing or embedding content is automatically non-infringing.

A 2021 ruling by the EU Court of Justice found that embedding content in a third-party website can be infringing, if rightsholders have expressed opposition to it. In this case the man was informed by the rightsholders in advance that they did not consent to this type of use.

Under these conditions, embedding the streaming links constituted a “communication to the public” of restricted content, a breach of EU copyright law.

“The man has been deemed aware of these prohibitions and has continued to act in spite of them,” the Court found, noting that the defendant reaped the benefits of his own on-site advertising instead.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.