Source: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2013/03/20/echr-copyright-vs-freedom-of-expression-ii-the-pirate-bay/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 16:35:18+00:00

Document:
ECHR Decision of the ECtHR (5th section) of 19 February 2013. Case of Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (The Pirate Bay) v. Sweden, Appl. nr. 40397/12.
By Dirk Voorhoof, Ghent University and Inger Høedt-Rasmussen, Copenhagen Business School.
The criminal conviction of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay for infringement of copyright does not violate Article 10 ECHR.
Only a few weeks after the Strasbourg Court’s judgment in the case of Ashby Donald and others v. France (ECtHR 10 January 2013, see our blogs on the KluwerCopyrightBlog and the ECHR-Blog ) the Court has decided a new case of conflicting rights between copyright and freedom of expression.
The case concerned the complaint by two of the co-founders of “The Pirate Bay”, that their conviction for complicity to commit crimes in violation of the Copyright Act had breached their freedom of expression and information. The Court held that sharing, or allowing others to share, files of this kind on the Internet, even copyright-protected material and for profit-making purposes, was indeed covered by the right to “receive and impart information” under Article 10 of the European Convention. However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake – i.e. the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright – when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded. In a very similar fashion to the judgment in the case of Ashby Donald and others v. France of 10 January 2013, the Court is of the opinion that there were reasons to afford the state authorities a “particularly wide” margin of appreciation.
“Anyone who, in relation to a literary or artistic work, commits an act which infringes the copyright enjoyed in the work (..) shall, where the act is committed wilfully or with gross negligence, be punished by fines or imprisonment for not more than two years.
Anyone who for his private use copies a computer programme which is published or of which a copy has been transferred with the authorisation of the author shall not be subject to criminal liability, if the master copy for the copying is not used in commercial or public activities and he or she does not use the copies produced of the computer programme for any purposes other than his private use. Anyone who for his private use has made a copy in digital form of a compilation in digital form which has been made public shall, under the same conditions, not be subject to criminal liability for the act.
Several companies in the entertainment business brought private claims within the criminal proceedings against the defendants and demanded compensation for illegal use of copyright-protected music, films and computer games. The claims amounted to several million Euros (EUR). In 2010 Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi were convicted, receiving prison sentences of ten and eight months, and ordered to pay damages of approximately EUR 5 million. The Swedish Court found that TBP had furthered illegal file-sharing in such a way that the persons responsible for it became criminally liable. Neij was found to have been engaged in the programming, systematisation and daily operations of TPB. Sunde Kolmisoppi was found to have contributed to the financing of TPB by collecting debts from two advertisers and, moreover, to have contributed in closing an advertising agreement. He had further contributed to the development of TPB’s systematic tracker function and database and he had configured a load balancing service for TPB. Upon further appeal by the applicants, the Supreme Court (Högsta domstolen) refused leave to appeal on 1 February 2012.
Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi complained under Article 10 of the Convention that their right to receive and impart information had been violated when they were convicted for other persons’ use of TPB. According to the applicants, Article 10 of the Convention enshrines the right to offer an automatic service of transferring unprotected material between users, according to basic principles of communication on the Internet, and within the information society. In their view, Article 10 of the Convention protects the right to arrange a service on the Internet which can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, without the persons responsible for the service being convicted for acts committed by the people using the service. In this connection, they referred to international frameworks, expressing a far-reaching right to receive and provide information between Internet users. Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi also alleged that they could not be held responsible for other people’s use of TPB, the initial purpose of which was merely to facilitate the exchange of data on the Internet. According to them, only those users who had exchanged illegal information on copyright-protected material had committed an offence.
“The Court notes from the outset that the applicants were convicted for their involvement in the running of a website which made it possible for users to share digital material such as movies, music and computer games, which were copyright-protected. The Court has consistently emphasised that Article 10 guarantees the right to impart information and the right of the public to receive it (see, amongst other authorities, Observer and Guardian v. the United Kingdom, 26 November 1991, § 59(b), Series A no. 216). In the light of its accessibility and its capacity to store and communicate vast amounts of information, the Internet plays an important role in enhancing the public’s access to news and facilitating the sharing and dissemination of information generally (Times Newspapers Ltd v. the United Kingdom (nos. 1 and 2), nos. 3002/03 and 23676/03, § 27, ECHR 2009, and Ashby Donald and Others v. France, no. 36769/08, § 34, 10 January 2013 –not yet final).
Moreover, Article 10 applies not only to the content of the information but also to the means of transmission or reception since any restriction imposed on the means necessarily interferes with the right to receive and impart information (see, for example, Öztürk v. Turkey [GC], no. 22479/93, § 49, ECHR 1999-VI). Furthermore, Article 10 of the Convention guarantees freedom of expression to “everyone”. No distinction is made in it according to whether the aim pursued is profit-making or not (see, mutatis mutandis, Autronic AG v. Switzerland, judgment of 22 May 1990, Series A no. 178, p. 23, 47). In the present case, the applicants put in place the means for others to impart and receive information within the meaning of Article 10 of the Convention. The Court considers that the actions taken by the applicants are afforded protection under Article 10 § 1 of the Convention and, consequently, the applicants’ convictions interfered with their right to freedom of expression. Such interference breaches Article 10 unless it was “prescribed by law”, pursued one or more of the legitimate aims referred to in Article 10 § 2 and was “necessary in a democratic society” to attain such aim or aims”.
As a consequence, the applicants’ conviction based on provisions of the Copyright Act and Criminal Code, restricting their right of freedom of expression and information, must be sufficiently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim.
That the interference by the Swedish authorities was prescribed by law and pursued the legitimate aim of the protection of rights of others and prevention of crime, was not under discussion. Again the crucial question was whether this interference corresponded to a pressing social need, meeting the test of necessity in a democratic society.
The Court emphasizes that this test “cannot be applied in absolute terms”. Indeed, the Court must take into account various factors, such as the nature of the competing interests involved and the degree to which those interests require protection in the circumstances of the case. In the present case, the Court was called upon to weigh, on the one hand, the interest of the applicants to facilitate the sharing of the information in question and, on the other, the interest in protecting the rights of the copyright-holders. Thus, the Swedish authorities had to balance two competing interests which were both protected by the Convention.
The Court argues that the Swedish authorities had a wide margin of appreciation to decide on such matters – especially since the information at stake was not given the same level of protection as political expression and debate – and that their obligation to protect copyright under both the Copyright Act and the Convention had constituted weighty reasons for the restriction of the applicants’ freedom of expression. Due to the nature of the information at hand and the balancing interest of conflicting Convention rights, as accumulating factors, the margin of appreciation the national authorities can rely on in this case, is “particularly wide”.
The European Court is of the opinion that “since the Swedish authorities were under an obligation to protect the plaintiffs’ property rights in accordance with the Copyright Act and the Convention, (..) there were weighty reasons for the restriction of the applicants’ freedom of expression”. The Swedish courts advanced relevant and sufficient reasons to consider that the activities of Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi within the commercially run TPB amounted to criminal conduct requiring appropriate punishment. In this respect, the Court reiterates that the applicants were only convicted for materials which were copyright-protected.
Finally, the Court argues that the prison sentence and award of damages cannot be regarded as disproportionate. In reaching this conclusion, the Court has regard to the fact that the domestic courts found that the applicants had not taken any action to remove the torrent files in question, despite having been urged to do so. Instead they had been indifferent to the fact that copyright-protected works had been the subject of file-sharing activities via TPB. Therefore, the Court concluded that the interference with the right to freedom of expression of Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi had been necessary in a democratic society and that their application had therefore to be rejected as manifestly ill-founded.
It is standard case law of the ECtHR that in cases of conflicting Convention rights, the State benefits from a wide margin of appreciation (see also other cases of conflicting rights, e.g. between Article 8 and Article 10 of the Convention (privacy and freedom of expression)).
Where the balancing exercise between two Convention rights has been undertaken by the national authorities in conformity with the criteria laid down in the Court’s case-law, it requires strong reasons for the European Court to substitute its view for that of the domestic courts (ECtHR (Grand Chamber) 7 February 2012, Axel Springer AG v. Germany, § 88). However, the circumstance itself of the balancing of conflicting rights does not exclude a thorough analysis by the Court of the findings and reasoning by the national courts, as is demonstrated in the Court’s Grand Chamber judgments of 7 February 2012 in the cases of Axel Springer AG v. Germany and Von Hannover nr. 2 v. Germany.
The thoroughness of this analysis will however depend of the type or nature of information and ideas the national authorities have interfered with. Indeed the Strasbourg case law reflects a strict analysis and scrutiny by the Court in cases related to freedom of expression on issues of public interest , and especially “political expression and debate”. The safeguards afforded to the distributed material in respect of which the co-founders of TBP were convicted however cannot reach the same level as the one afforded to political expression and debate. Hence a wider margin of appreciation is available for the domestic authorities. Furthermore the Court can refer to the Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers CM/Rec(2007)16 to member States on measures to promote the public service value of the Internet. The Committee of Ministers noted that the Internet could, on the one hand, significantly enhance the exercise of certain human rights and fundamental freedoms while, on the other, it could adversely affect these and other such rights. The member States are recommended to elaborate a clear legal framework delineating the boundaries of the roles and responsibilities of all key stakeholders in the field of new information and communication technologies.
In the case of Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi v. Sweden the European Court of Human Rights could not find any relevant or pertinent arguments to “overrule” the findings by the Swedish courts. As Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi made available on TBP website well-developed search functions, simple uploading and storing possibilities and a tracker system, TPB facilitated and furthered crimes in violation of the Swedish Copyright Act. This made Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi objectively guilty of complicity to commit crimes in violation of the Copyright Act.
As regards the applicants’ argument that they should be granted freedom from criminal liability in accordance with the Electronic Commerce Act, the Swedish courts noted that the co-founders of TPB had committed the offences intentionally and that the provisions on freedom from criminal liability in the Act were not applicable under such circumstances. It was also noted that Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi had not taken any precautionary measures, and torrent files which referred to copyright-protected material had not been removed despite warnings and requests that they do so.
It is in this context, referring to these specific elements in the case, that the European Court is of the opinion that the conviction of the co-founders of TBP was manifestly not in breach of their right under Article 10 of the Convention. As the co-founders of TPB have furthered illegal file-sharing in such a way that they became criminally liable, without any further relevance in relation to their right of freedom of expression and information, not much weight was to be given to their claim under 10 of the Convention. Just like in Ashby Donald a.o. v. France actually, it seems that at the domestic level no weight at all has been given to the interests based on Article 10 of the Convention.
Although the European Court for the second time in a period of only a few weeks did not find a violation of Article 10 of the Convention, the decision in this case confirms that copyright enforcement, restrictions on the use of copyright protected works and sanctions based on copyright law ultimately can be regarded as interferences with the right of freedom of expression and information. This requires inevitably a balancing test between the rights involved. For the moment however, there is an uncertain future for the application of Article 10 in matters of copyright enforcement interfering with the right of freedom of expression and information, as neither in Ashby Donald a.o. v. France, nor in Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi v. Sweden, the Court was in a position to elaborate on the factors and criteria to be integrated in such a balancing exercise, leaving in both cases, due to the concrete elements, a particularly wide margin of appreciation to the member states.
For a more elaborate analysis of this issue and list of references on the conflict between copyright and freedom of expression, see our previous blog. From 5 to 7 April 2013 the EIPIN (European Intellectual Property Institutes Network) annual conference will focus on the issue of conflicting IP-rights and (other) human rights. The title of the conference is : “Human Rights and Intellectual Property. From Concepts to Practice”. See also the documentary TBP AFK, The Pirate Bay. Away From the Keyboard.

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