In the wake of the shutdowns of the last Danish illegal networks, the Danish Rights Alliance has stated that we will now seek to sanction the hard-core users who continue their illegal activities. But how do we do that?
There are doubts in the various piracy chat forums for those Danish online pirates who stubbornly stick to their illegal activities. Doubts about whether the Danish Rights Alliance has the tools and resources to figure out who they are so they can be reported to the police. Many online pirates hide behind various services, including VPN connections, in the belief that they are then safe from being identified.
This might also have been the case a few years ago, as the Danish Rights Alliance described in an article in January, in which we described the path to a more regulated internet. At that time, there was not as much focus on targeting users, as the resources were scarce, and the police had no IP-Taskforce with the skills to prosecute IP-crime.
Today, on the other hand, Denmark has an efficient and competent IP-Taskforce under the Danish State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime, and so now the options concerning sanctioning users are completely different. In practice, the cases have shifted from civil proceedings to criminal proceedings. Today there is a greater focus on utilizing the penalty framework for the type of serious copyright infringements that the hard-core users take part in, where the penalty is up to six years in prison.
The penalty of up to six years imprisonment is stated in section 299 of the Danish Criminal Code:
Anyone who unjustifiably obtains or gains access to or otherwise in particularly aggravating circumstances is guilty of copyright infringement of a particularly serious nature, is punishable with imprisonment for up to six years, cf. the Copyright Act, section 76, subsection. 2.
This penal framework opens a completely different investigative toolbox for the police in Denmark and for international cooperation, where states provide mutual legal assistance so that electronic evidence of criminal acts can be exchanged.
The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime has been created with the exact aim that criminals should not be able to hide on the internet when committing a serious crime. Therefore, states may request other states’ assistance in accessing electronic evidence data. An example of this could be data from VPN service providers users have used for illegal file-sharing. Therefore, the Danish Rights Alliance also looks forward to the identity of those users, who have stayed hidden so far.
The users that the Danish Rights Alliance has in mind are the so-called “hard-core” users. They are defined as the users who have chosen to continue their illegal activities despite police intervention on several occasions in recent months. They predominantly use special IT equipment to streamline their illegal file sharing and try to obscure their identity with VPN services.
These are the Danish users who, after the shutdowns of the illegal services DanishBits, NordicBits, Asgaard, and ShareUniversity, have applied for new networks, e.g. SuperBits. Maria Fredenslund, director of the Danish Rights Alliance, denies that the remaining users are “small fish”, as they like to call define themselves, and that has no real influence on the illegal market, and therefore the first hard-core users have already been reported to the police in 2021.