Cargo of vessel capsized near Sweden in 19th century also includes mineral water, say Polish divers

Polish divers have discovered a 19th-century shipwreck with a hold full of crates of champagne and porcelain in the Baltic Sea off the Swedish coast.

The divers said on Wednesday they were thrilled to find rare “treasure” on board when they came upon the presumed merchant vessel. “The whole wreck is loaded to the brim with crates of champagne, mineral water and china,” Tomasz Stachura, the Baltictech diver group leader, told AFP.

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Juan Cifuentes and Farooq Abdulrazak reported missing by families after failing to return home from work trip

The Metropolitan police have said they are trying to establish if two Londoners reported missing in Sweden are the two people whose bodies were found in a burned-out rental car in Malmö.

Juan Cifuentes, 33, and Farooq Abdulrazak, 37, from north London, were reported missing by their families after failing to return home on Sunday from a business trip to Denmark and Sweden.

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Driver and passenger had been shot dead after car had reportedly been driven from Denmark to Malmo

Police are investigating a double shooting in Sweden after two bodies were found in a burnt-out car rented by a British citizen.

The driver and passenger, who had driven across the Denmark-Sweden border into the southern city of Malmö, were shot on Sunday, according to the daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

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DNA studies suggest disease was central to devastating collapse of northern European population 5,000 years ago

A devastating population collapse that decimated stone age farming communities across northern Europe 5,000 years ago may have been driven by an outbreak of the plague, according to research.

The cause of the calamity, known as the Neolithic collapse, has long been a matter of debate.

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New foreign secretary has wasted no time in visiting some of his European counterparts to strike a new tone

It felt like a deeply symbolic, even cathartic, moment on Saturday lunchtime as, on take-off from Stansted, the pilot carrying the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, banked the government plane with the union jack livery sharply leftwards across the sodden and half-occluded fields of Essex and towards Europe.

For the first of what are likely to be innumerable overseas trips, Lammy had chosen Destination Europe, and Operation Reset. It was intended quite literally to be a flying start as he hurtled from his first cabinet meeting down the M11 and on to a flight to Berlin, Stockholm and Bydgoszcz, close to the pastoral family home of the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

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Skarsgård and his son Gustaf sparkle in Ran Huang’s rarefied film, but can’t rescue this weirdly hallucinatory murder mystery from falling flat

This intense psychological drama has a squid in the sky problem. Specifically it’s that, by its halfway point, Ran Huang’s rarefied Scandinavian crime feature has fully established a predilection for spooky visual motifs, including eerie establishing shots and nocturnal scenes so murky it’s hard to know what’s going on (although the keening, discordant musical soundtrack suggests it’s probably something bad). And then seemingly out of nowhere, after a particularly emotional moment, there’s a cut to a forest treeline where some kind of cephalopod is floating in the sky, tentacles waving like one of those plastic “ sky dancers ” often seen in American car dealerships’ parking lots. Is it supposed to be a hallucination of the main character, Mats Lake (Gustaf Skarsgård), a troubled psychiatric patient who has recently confessed to a string of murders? Immediately after the squid shot, which lasts all of 12 seconds, the next one is of an impassive policeman smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky. Is he the one who sees the giant sea creature up there, but is somehow not even bothered? Is it supposed to be a metaphor? Or one of those fancy film-school distancing effects?

Given that the beastie is never explained, I’m guessing it’s meant to be a vexingly opaque symbol of what’s going on in the film itself. Basically, here is something bizarre and totally inexplicable happening in the peaceful Scandinavian countryside that’s so odd that nobody can process it – so no one comments on it, as if it’s not even happening. That would apply equally to the child murders Mats lays claim to, as well as the sexual abuse he claims his own father subjected him to when he was a child – abuse that his brother, Ralf (Magnus Krepper), does not recall at all. But Mats’ therapist, Anna Rudebeck (Andrea Riseborough), believes what Mats is saying, as does police detective Soren Rank (Stellan Skarsgård). Their faith in Mats as both perpetrator and victim is so profound that, when the evidence starts looking shaky and Mats fails to lead the police to a single victim’s body, they go on believing in him for reasons connected to their own troubled psyches.

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The Swedish actor is playing a bamboozled police officer in What Remains, a film written by his wife and starring one of his sons. He looks back on mixing Marvel with arthouse, taking risks with Lars von Trier and Sweden joining Nato

Stellan Skarsgård is speaking to me from his cabin, outside Stockholm, and why shouldn’t he look relaxed and happy, in those clement, sun-dappled surrounds? But it is so disconcerting. His performance in What Remains, as a battle-scarred police officer, trying to keep hold of his family, his bearings and his scepticism in the face of a criminological modernity that puzzles him, joins a body of knotty work that UK audiences would probably date back to Breaking the Waves, Lars von Trier’s 1996 classic. His smallest facial gesture speaks fathomless emotion. I am a huge Mamma Mia! fan – in which he plays Bill Anderson – so I have seen Skarsgård smile, but even then, not all the time .

What Remains is based, loosely, on a famous case in Sweden: it was the 90s, and the so-called “retrieved memory” technique was huge, even though in the US, where it was developed, it had already been disallowed as reliable evidence. “All psychologists in Sweden were using retrieved memory at the same time, a lot of men were put in jail for violating their children,” Skarsgård says. “It’s really the fabrication of memory. It was very optimistic, to think you can just open up the memory and look at it. Every divorce you’ve been through, you’ll know, the truth isn’t exactly as everybody says.”

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Referred to in legal papers as simply J.E., the defendant was targeted in Sweden by local anti-piracy group Rattighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance) on behalf of major movie and TV show companies Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk Film.

The plaintiffs’ claim stated that J.E., either intentionally or with gross negligence, acted alone or in concert with others, to infringe their copyrights in cinematographic works.

They alleged that between August 20, 2020, and May 17, 2022, J.E. made movies available to the public through a popular pirate IPTV service, Scandinavian IPTV. In the alternative, the plaintiffs said that through his conduct, J.E. encouraged someone else to infringe their rights in 19 movies via the Scandinavian IPTV service.

Suspect Arrested in May 2022

On May 5, 2022, Swedish police arrested J.E. in his absence, with a physical arrest executed on May 17, almost two weeks later. During questioning, J.E. initially denied the offenses, but anti-piracy group Rights Alliance had already amassed considerable evidence.

Scandinavian IPTV wasn’t officially registered as a company. However, via a ProtonMail email address, American Express payment cards, and a Stripe account, Rights Alliance was able to link J.E. to the unlicensed platform.

An analysis of various items of seized equipment revealed telephone messages, sent and received by J.E., which discussed the IPTV business. Information on J.E.’s computer revealed similar evidence in the form of IPTV-related account logins.

A financial investigation indicated that payments totaling SEK 5.5 million (~US$5.2m) had been made to J.E.’s two PayPal accounts, with the funds subsequently transferred to six bank accounts he also operated. IPTV boxes and associated invoices were also seized.

Previously, Rights Alliance had carried out test purchases to show that the service infringed the plaintiffs’ rights by making available around 19 sample movies. That period of testing – or rather the months preceding it – would soon limit the scope of the prosecution’s case.

Patent and Market Court Convicts

In its judgment handed down in April 2023, Sweden’s Patent and Market Court found J.E. guilty of violating the Copyright Act. The defendant received a suspended prison sentence and was ordered to pay 60 daily fines totaling SEK 34,800, around US$3,300 at today’s rates.

He was also ordered to compensate Svensk Filmindustri (SEK 63,000 / US$6,000) and Nordisk Film (SEK 191,500 / US$18,600), with SEK 5,000 (US$4,760) forfeited to the state as proceeds of crime, and an additional SEK 150,000 (US$14,280) to cover legal costs. These amounts were a far cry from those demanded by the plaintiffs.

Svensk Filmindustri had requested compensation of SEK 910,000 (US$86,700), Nordisk Film requested (Danish) DKK 2,355,000 (US$338,000). Yet, despite what amounted to a confession, both realized much smaller amounts. Something had gone wrong.

Confession vs. Evidence

J.E. admitted launching Scandinavian IPTV in 2019 and a Rights Alliance investigator confirmed that the service had attracted attention after appearing close to the top of Google search results.

By August 2020, a “large number of payments” for IPTV subscriptions had been received by J.E., including a one-month subscription purchased covertly by Rights Alliance on August 20, 2020, which was used to the monitor the service for the next seven days. To the standard required in a criminal case, that was the extent of the evidence, as the judgment explained:

The prosecutor has claimed that the access for which J.E. is to be held responsible has been going on for almost two years. During the preliminary investigation, checks were made to ensure that Scandinavian IPTV’s website was still up and running, but there was no documentation that the films in question had been available on the service after August 27, 2020.

Photographs from the search of J.E.’s home on May 17, 2022, show some of the films being played on a TV screen. However, there is no information that the films were played via Scandinavian IPTV’s service, nor has this been alleged by the prosecutor. Under these circumstances, with the strict evidentiary requirements that prevail in criminal cases, it cannot be considered proven that J.E. made the films available after August 27, 2020

The end result was a conviction for copyright infringement, but only for the violations carried out during the evidenced seven-day period. J.E. also had a clean record, with the court noting that “neither the nature of the crime nor the severity of the punishment justifies a prison sentence.”

Calculations presented by the plaintiffs, to demonstrate the value of the film works infringed, were acceptable to the court; however, since infringement could only be established for a week, compensation was reduced to one tenth of the amounts requested.

Patent and Market Court of Appeal

Following an appeal, an amended judgment was handed down Wednesday by the Patent and Market Court of Appeal. Taking into account changes in the wording of the Copyright Act during a now extended period of offending, the Court took a much firmer line.

J.E. was sentenced for violations of the Copyright Act committed between August 28 and August 31, 2020, and during the period September 1, 2020, to May 17, 2022. The Court of Appeal increased the number of daily fines from 60 to 100, for a new total of SEK 58,000 (US$5,520) versus SEK 34,800 (US$3,300) ordered in the previous judgment.

Compensation amounts were also amended in favor of the plaintiffs. (Nordisk award in Danish currency)

• Svensk Filmindustri: SEK 747,500 / US$71,200 | (previously SEK 63,000 / US$6,000)

• Nordisk Film: DKK 2,032,500 / US$291,700 | (previously SEK 191,500 / US$18,600)

The prosecutor’s appeal of the earlier judgment stated that J.E. should be convicted of copyright infringement entirely in accordance with the indictment. Whether J.E. was convicted for the entire period claimed in the indictment or the very short period evidenced in the case, the prosecutor argued that SEK 4,000,000 (US$381,000) should be forfeited as proceeds of crime.

J.E.’s appeal requested the dismissal of the indictment in its entirety, along with the individual claims for compensation and the claim for confiscation of property as proceeds of crime.

Court of Appeal Considered Evidence Obtained During the Raid

In respect of the infringement period, limited by the lower court on evidential grounds, the Court of Appeal disagreed on the scope of the offending by considering evidence obtained by the police.

When J.E.’s home was raided on May 17, 2022, officers searched for the plaintiffs’ films on an IPTV device found on site. All but two of the films existed and were playable. At the time, J.E. claimed that the device used a service other than Scandinavian IPTV, but the Court dismissed that claim as unlikely.

In summary, the Court of Appeal found that, contrary to the conclusion of the lower court, J.E. should be convicted for infringing copyright for the entire period of time stated in the indictment.

The Court also found that the plaintiffs suffered reputational damage, for which J.E. should pay compensation: Svensk Filmindustri SEK 152,500 (US$14,500), and Nordisk Film SEK 252,500 (US$24,000), amounts that are included in the totals above.

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

Concert footage, theoretically bolstered with frontman Tobias Forge’s feeble skits, seems likely to please only the diehard types

The concept of a cultural object as “Marmite” – ie you’ll either love it or hate it – is an overused one but may come into play here. Rite Here Rite Now is essentially a rock concert film, showcasing the Swedish theatrical rock band Ghost, and it’s exactly the sort of on-the-face-of-it loud and wacky business that people like to describe as a Marmite movie – but the truth is that at its core, it’s a pretty tame film, which fits the band’s goofy brand of soft metal.

Rock bands have a long history of dubious antics in their capacity as professional provocateurs, but Ghost’s major controversy is not especially rock’n’roll: it’s a legal dispute as to whether the masked “Nameless Ghouls” who make up the majority of the band qualify as band members or session musicians. The most daring (and genuinely rather tasteless) moment in the film comes courtesy of the closing credits – a montage of various famous serial killers might feel par for the course in metal-land, but the inclusion of other imagery such as the haunting image of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc in the Pulitzer prize–winning photograph The Terror of War is an odd choice tonally.

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