Norwegian Police Deal Massive Blow to MPAA Lawyer
Here is an article I found very interesting which shows that some countries are moving in the right direction when it comes to anti-piracy policies. Personally I just love to hear stuff like this, so hopefully you will enjoy the read as much as I did. ^^
Pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel has been told by the police that they will not spend their valuable resources chasing file-sharers. Undeterred, Tøndel wrote to the Department of Justice demanding a meeting about the police’s decision. They responded all right – and denied him a meeting.
Today, Norway appears to be a much safer country for petty file sharers. The Hollywood lawyer Espen Tøndel has been told by Kripos (serious crime police) that they will not be spending time investigating small-time pirates.
Like many lawyers in the anti-piracy arena, Tøndel tries to blur civil and criminal law to obtain leverage. The police are clear – their priority is investigating real crimes, such as murder and robbery and sadly for him, file-sharing does not fall into those categories. Tøndel must now make his claims against alleged pirates in a civil court.
Following this major setback, Tøndel wrote to the Department of Justice and demanded a meeting with them. He complained that copyright holders need to go through the criminal system as without the help of the police, all they have is an IP address. They cannot sue an IP address, they need a real name and identity.
Unfortunately for Tøndel, the response wasn’t what he’d been hoping for -the Department of Justice completely refused him a meeting- leaving him to start suing IP addresses, which he’s not allowed to do. Ouch.
On Sunday, Trond Giske, Minister of Culture in Norway told VG.no: “We have no plans to do anything similar to the Brits. To identify the users is quite a substantial process, so we plan to focus on only those who upload movies and music illegally. We are cooperating closely with the industry, and are well aware of the money they are loosing because of the illegal downloading.”
Norwegian political commentators are suggesting that Norway’s biggest political party and government, Arbeiderpartiet, aren`t going to change their policy on this because they are afraid of losing votes amongst the 18 to 30 year olds.
So can Norwegian file-sharers feel safe from prosecution now? “No, they can’t. I’m just saying that we will use most of our resources on those who uploads illegally” said Giske in a tone suggesting it’s only serious uploaders who need to take care.
Back in November 2007, Tøndel reported 14 people to the police for sharing the movie, ‘Kill Buljo’, even though the director of the movie didn’t agree with this course of action. I expect there are at least 14 BitTorrent fans smiling today, shortly to be joined by thousands more.
Norway joins Canada in a growing group of common-sense countries which refuse to waste public resources on petty file-sharers. Other countries – such as Germany and the UK are particularly weak. Although they don’t directly involve the police, they allow lawyers to blatantly (ab)use the system by claiming they are prosecuting a criminal case, simply in order to obtain a file-sharer’s identity. They then drop the criminal case, only to pursue a financially lucrative civil one, a tactic favored by lawyers Davenport Lyons to un-mask alleged BitTorrent pirates in the UK.
It’s uncertain at this point if the imminent raids suggested by Tøndel back in October 2007, will become more or less imminent following this statement by the police. Even though the Department of Justice won’t speak to Tøndel, we did, but sadly he doesn’t seem to have a statement for us right now.
Source: TorrentFreak
Comments(110)
Hooray for Norway!
xfroggy its 2008, find a new bandwagon to jump on. be a little creative like start a hate club for eurasians or something
In your face Espen! Now if we could just get the cops to lay off the minor drug users like casual marijuana users then maybe we could stop real crimes like murder and violence.
Thanks for the post on this. It is nice to know that the fight is on!
Good to know some countries think that P2P isn’t all that bad.
makes me hate living in the US even more.
Some post #4. Shows you to be a caring, well versed contribution to the human race. Your mother must be very proud.
as you can see lawyers always win! you need him to defend you against industry and industry needs him to prosecute you.
Yay for lawyers?
i hope Australia goes in the same direction, let these stupid production companies deal with their own problems.
This guy Tøndel has really nothing to do in his life. Douchebag.
Is it true that the entire country of Norway has only 4.7 million people?
How is this even relevant, coming from such a tiny country? Why dont they just merge with Sweden and Finland and form one normal size country?
So if Tøndel’s Daughter/niece etc. gets raped, im sure he would tell the cops “hey stop wasting your man power….10,000 B.C. is already on the internet….lets get the leaker!!!!”
NO he would want the cops to take men off this petty crime!! typical
Old. Posted at torrentfreak.com this morning.
You can be sure Espen Tøndel could get the attention of the Kripos if the the thieves were after some of the revenue from Telenor or StatoilHydro or Norsk Hydro or Statkraft.
But since the thieves are only stealing revenue from American companies, the Kripos will not get off their asses.
Someday Norway will need the help of the US, and then the US will remember this slap in the face.
I dont know about this Canada thingie, if you read the article in Maximum PC (March issue) Canadians only escaped having a new tax placed on them for file sharing by the skin of their teeth. As it stands right now, they almost also had to pay a tax on memory cards/digital music players/ipods/hard drives/thumb drives-flash drives/ and any other data storage deives. As it stands right now they already pay a tax on recordable cd’s and dvd’s and cassettes.
We may have won the battle in Norway, but the war is far from over.
YEY! Lenge leve Norge!
LOL @ llllllllllllllllllloooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllll
I like them, they make good music, and they get their money
did you really need to write it that many times?
@ 15
Please, you have no idea what you’re talking about. The tax you’re reffering to was on newly purchased MP3 Players such as iPods. That tax wasn’t ‘nearly’ put into effect, either. It was struck down immediately.
Canada’s laws are essentially this: You can download whatever the f*** you want, do whatever the f*** you want with what you download as long as you don’t profit off of it in anyway.
good job cops. now just stop wasting tax payer’s money with stupid trials that takes years to convict serial killers that a blind man could see is guilty
@dan
You must realize though, that Canadians have now become used to paying more taxes than they ever have before. A simple little tax on blank CD’s is nothing compared to how much of their income they hand over every year to Ottawa.
Ya the RCMP already said they weren’t gonna waste time and money on prosecuting file sharers unless they are selling what they dl
@a
Of course not, Canada is another country that does not realize any revenue from an entertainment industry. So the country will not spend money to preserve the revenues of companies in another country.
So the only way the US can retaliate is send more pollution up north and destroy the logging industry and ruin the Canadian Prairies for farming. We’ll get them in the end.
Them vikings iz pirates, yar
The police in norway is way underpayed and don’t have the resources to meet these requests. So they focus on serious crimes instead. As they should.
@10 If you read up on scandinavian history the answer to that question is obvious
@Qeh
Norway has one of the largest social systems of any country on the planet. The police, like most civil servants, are most certainly not underpaid. If the police men and women thought they were being paid too little, they would leave public service and enter private industry jobs.
Lenny Kravitz: trying to figure out if the first paragraph is meant to be real
If it IS, they do make a lot of revenue of of movie/Tv since approx 1/3 of shows are taped in Canada, even though they say they are somewhere else.
Toronto has one of the most “Generic American” cities in the north and the costs are cheaper up north
@ Henry
The police DO think they are underpayed. It was a longer discussion on this topic on tv2 yesterday. It’s also creating a problem when it comes to future reqruiting as fewer and fewer competent men and women join the academy.
K, I might make it sound worse than it is. The last 5 years there has been a decrease in application and the qualification on those have decreased too. that’s what I meant
@Qeh
Then what is Harald V doing with all of the taxes in Norway? Certainly the people of Norway already give almost all of their salary over to this socialistiv government…can this wealthy government not give the police a little more money to stop the complaints among their troops?
I just love my country
Not only is Kripos busy with other things, the ISP’s like Telenor has a close lid on IP’s so it’s next to impossible to identify a IP without serious evidence (cuz the request for IPs has to come from the Police)
btw to answer Henry 2 posts over.
We have universal healthcare and other things, almost everything coming from the goverment is free, and is paid with the taxes they get in.
Actually taxes aren’t enough, so we take out money from the oil fund every year to compensate.
Actually how much to take out of the fond is a debate every time they are to represent new budget.
@5
People like you, make people like me, want to wipe my backside with the constitution.
can we please please please stop posting torrent freak’s articles. I’m pretty sure everyone that visits this site knows about that site or at least start writing your own articles instead of just copy and pasting.
How to best share the “goods” is a huge part of Norwegian politic. Why the police have fallen behind is beyond me. I just hope now that they make some noice, the goverment will take a 2nd look.
ALT FOR NORGE!!!!!!! (go norway!)
ok, sky just explained it a 100 times better than I could
@Sky
What oil fund? I think Norway has oil reserves, so you mean the money that your oil companies pay in taxes goes to supplement the taxes from the people?
@Staff
Look guys, this is silly. Most of us know about torrentfreak already, so stop ripping them off. Get your own material.
I move!
Go norway, i live in denmark and its rough there for File shares, i have had my part of it allready, i got around 10k euro Fine for around 100 movies, but that wont stop me.
LONG LIVE SHARING!
SHARING IS CARING!
Isn’t Denmark and Norway the same country?
nope, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, all different countries from Scandinavien Region
@extra happy
most dumb americans such as yourself would think so. but they are two seperate countries with a total population of close to ten million people.
while it is true that america has more than 10 million people in only a medium size state like michigan, these scandinavian countries are much colder and less desirable to live in.
I wish America would stop caring, but that’ll never happen, or if it does, piracy will be so widespread it won’t matter any more.
YAY Norway!
haha, that dude just got pwned!
it’s not that the police don’t think piracy is bad, it’s just that their government wants to solve real crimes, not digital ones.
@13 – ha….
@OFF TOPIC NEED HELP PLEASE. I was wondering if anyone can explain to me why the 720p version of ross kemp in afghanistan wont play, every time I extract it becomes a .mkv file not avi.
AN EXPLANATION IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.
@likemike
Yes, the explanation is that you are a n00b moron.
The mkv file you are extracting is the file type that most HD videos use. Simply play the mkv file using VLC and you can watch your Ross Kemp crap.
But don’t you think the reason why these other countries dont care as much is because the vast production of high value media comes from America and represents a portion (not sure how much) of their economy? You’d care if money-making potential was being taken out from underneath your feet as well? Maybe it will transform it for the better, pushing money-hungry corporations to the side and allowing artists to take control of the industry again, if profits really are negatively effected?
its supposed to… install cccp, corecodec or just see if it plays fine in vlc player
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_play_mkv.cfm
Man! That stupid S0novaB1tch Pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel looks like a cartoon character! What more could that looser expect.
@Poppa!
What does this word mean in your comment: “looser”?
Some1 from staff plz atleast remove post #13, u oughtta permban his ass though.
@ #53
“looser” means the opposite of “tighter”
which means that “looser” was not the word the commenter meant to use in his comment. perhaps he could try again, this time with some thought.
Enough off topic comments about the idiot who downloaded a movie he can’t even watch. He can Google his way and learn enough to be able to watch it, or he just will not watch it. Stop babying him.
Back to the discussion about Norway and their useless police force.
@arrogant
You’ll know it when u grow up a bit more and understand the meaning of another word: Typo!
Till then, do your hometasks regularly little buddy – don’t spend so mush time on net – that too in a place like this which is an ideal hangout place mainly for adults & young adults.
What??? Norwegian police give a massibe blowjob to a MPAA lawyer? That’s crazy man.
But i know for a fact that the anti-piracy folks here in Denmark don’t need to contact the police to get the name and adress of the IP-holder. They just go straight for the ISP and go from there. Which is soooo lame
Dear eZtaR. This is your ISP speaking, we have just gave out your information to the danish police. Expect them knocking at your door any minute now.
@eZtaR
The Denmarkian police are on their way to your home right now. Your ISP has given them your information.
hmm thats goods news
hey do some one nows a good webhosting on Norway i want to hire a host any help ?
@64 muah: I do. I care about Norway, I care about Scandinavia, I care about Europe. I couldn’t care less about stupid Americans thinking Europe is a country. You are without doubt the least educated people walking on this planet. In fact I’m surprised you can walk. If some filesharing brings down the US movie industry and it ruins your country the so be it, I couldn’t care less.
Deilig å være norsk i Norge
Its good to be an norwegian living in Norway!
In your FACE GWBush
Yey! I’m still in the safe zone ;P
i wish here in Australia it was like that small time piracy like most people do isnt destroying anything except that some of those studios executives mightn’t be able to afford a rare wine on one of their countless fancy dinners and what they waste on sending lawyers around the world to chase after these people who might download 10 movies.. give it up mpaa and accept the fact people are sick of paying tons of money for a generic movie that hollywood keeps pumping out of its arse.
Norge tar helt av når det gjeller ned lastning! Elsker å bo i Norge
Og vi unge skal gjøre det enda bedre for den kommende generasjon 
and to NR 13 ” Lenny Kravitz”
If you think that we need help from you. Then you are sadly mistaken. It is actually you who need help from us and our reliable oil supply. Actually you our us a favor
and if we ever needed help we would ask our close friends in Denmark and Sweden. Ofcourse we got the EU too.
My thinking is we all know that downloading copywritten stuff is technically illegal, but trying to go after people for it is like trying to arrest everyone who records a TV show to VHS.
Damn, Scandinavia countries rule, they sure are the elite of Europe =>
Go Norway Go
HAHA! lættis!
The important background knowledge to this story is that there has yet to be a p2p/torrent lawsuit in norwegian courts, less some dudes running dc servers.
For a long time now (a year++), tøndel and his mafiaa-associates has promised that we would finally have to answer for our wrongdoings, that massive lawsuits would finally come to norway too.
Myself, I’ve blocked all norwegian/us IP addresses for the last year or so (and uk/australia/germany too, but I’ve other good reasons to be paranoid), anticipating increased mafiaa-activity in the logging business.
They took good time building and recording evidence for the first cases, making sure that they should go easily through the courts and pave the way for a wave of lawsuits all norwegian pirates would fear.
And this was it. 14 lawsuits to set the precedence straight in norwegian courts. Press coverage and pre-written notices were ready for all news media so that mafiaa’s victory would be loud and clear.
…
FAIL
Oh and to all norwegians proclaiming how much better norway is than any other country, grow up. To all who post norwegian comments, grow up and learn english..
man, it’s like there is this group of people that have set a google news alert for “[norway|norwegian]” in all international sites, jumping in at once to either protect norway if the news is bad or, more likely, boast and brag about how cool it is to be norwegian etc etc. If you want norway to be cool, search youtube for “norway wingsuit” instead.
Not that danes or sweedes are much better :p
Stop praising Norway, piece of crap country.
We dont have enough police force (That’s a bad thing btw) to investigate on piracy, because they have to investigate so frickin’ hard on the all the murders, like there is such an overwhelming amount of murders in this little country??
@74
Norwegians make up under 0.1% of the worlds population, It is nice to get some recognition once in while.
I visit this site on a daily basis and so do many other Norwegians and I can understand those who feel the need to represent their country, since they don’t get the chance to do that so often.
NOOOOORGE!!!!
Very nice!
@4
You can leave the country anytime you wish. Because the USA is a FREE country and we will be more than happy to let you leave. But you won’t because you KNOW just how good you got it here.
It’s about time , somebody tries to place a wrench in the working gears of anti-piracy, it’s even better when a government is the one stepping up to plate and doing it, and that is all that should matter.
phew…. no need to fear the police busting down my door then..:p like I would accept beeing arrested for piracy… yeah right. Anyway, I can name policmen that got their PC`s filled with mp3`s, movies and games. What the hell is there to do at the station
pwned!
I am from Norway, we are untouchable!
@79
We (Norwegians) have so much more freedom than you in the US. We got the worlds best healthcare that includes free hospital for you when you get sick or old. We can make jokes about our prime minister, we can pirate without beiing afraid of the MPAA, IFPI or other idiot organisations. We don’t have to be afraid at school that some jerk off would storm the place with pistols and shoot like crazy. Sometimes some limits are better than none.
Lenny Kravitz:
Uhhmm…A pretty significant portion of movies and music are made in Canada. If the piracy affects the companies that makes the movies, then it affects Canadian jobs on those movies – and still we don’t care, because it’s been well known for many years that piracy is just part of the ecosystem. The pirates aren’t paying for things, but they generate talk about the products they like, which generates sales somewhere down the line. I don’t see anyone going out of business over piracy – never have. It’s the same old argument you see over and over, right back to when people were copying 8-tracks (and even before, but we’ll stop at 8-tracks since at least a few people will remember those). For all the screaming companies do over piracy, they certainly are building huge, powerful empires somehow despite the “theft”. It’s all a bunch of nonsense. The music, movie, and software industries are very healthy. They’re some of the largest industries in the world – they just want to be bigger. They’re all screaming the sky is falling – it’s not. It didn’t fall before, and it’s not falling now.
“We don’t have to be afraid at school that some jerk off would storm the place with pistols and shoot like crazy.”
U scare me dude.
@ Henry
February 21st, 2008 | 06:56
who wrote to sky
“What oil fund? I think Norway has oil reserves, so you mean the money that your oil companies pay in taxes goes to supplement the taxes from the people?”
The OilFound is the wast amount of cash that flows in from the sales of Oil to the rest of the world. And is “stored” and “invested” so we have cash to fall back on when the Oil Reserves run dry.
And the bigest Oil Company is “Goverment” Owned. (Its been privatized, but the largest stock holders are the Norwegian Goverment and the People of Norway)They do of course pay some taxes, but its peanuts compared to whats the sales/ investments from the oildrilling pays.
@ looser.. “Oh and to all norwegians proclaiming how much better norway is than any other country, grow up”
Get stuffed! Maybe if you got abit “tighter” you would know that Norway is one of the best countries in the fricking world to live in! Still, our polticians is a bunch of morons, but you get what you vote for..
And to you who complaints about our typing, get real. Not every one in the world is using English (and absolutly not American)as theire native language!(Not even theire second language or 3rd)
Rant off….
Have a great day and a wonderfull WinterHolliday fellow Norwegians
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/31/european_court_issues_new_file_sharing_directives
“The European Court of Justice decided earlier this week that EU law does not force the disclosure of file sharer’s details in copyright infringement cases.”
f**k the MPAA and other agencies, they fight because some multimillionare lose their “hard earned” money due to piracy, riiight. information must be free and f++k the movie industry that cant adopt to new technologies
Haha, Ownd, Tøndel!
Norge!
Someone needs to kick this douchebag in the balls.
yeah long live Norway
peace
I a know several cops who download music and games (I live in Norway)
let’s all move to Norway
I forgot i already liv hear hehe ;D
Everybody speaks of piracy as the specific countries being robbed.
The only country that benefit is….hel not even the USA i think.
MGM, Warner ets all have bigshot laywers and accountants and i am sure if you go in deep enough you will realise that thay screw the goverments out of TAX wheever they can with every loophole thay can find….this is not a country thing…this is a Company/Corporate loss of income, so why the hell should the cops be involved in the first place. Go look at who owns all these movie companies and a person will soon realise that it all belongs to filthy rich individuals who are all money hungry and would screw the goverment over if givin half a chance….
I obviosly didn; t know that about that but comparing it to saftly of living here i can now also not worry about this p2p stuff.Ha de bra Norge
o yeah and before i forget…how can thay release a dvd in China for US$1 and everywhere else thay selling the dvd for US$15 and upwards….they all make too much bloody money if u ask me…..thay created this piracy market by being so bloody greedy
@96
u got that right with the greed bit… LONG LIVE PIRACY!
Well, a high percent of torrent tracker and dc hubs have bin shutdown because of threats of suing and investigation. So Norway is not a free place for piracy i think rather opposite.
Sweden, Netherlands and even USA is safer i think.
I really never ever thought i would be glad to be living in
the disgusting capitalistic yankee suckup country of Norway.
And NEVER EVER did i think ANYTHING positive about the norwegian police, but this changes ALL that ! ;P
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
Espen Tøndel will burn in lawyer hell!!!!!!!
Move to scandinavia people,the only place that have true democracy and freedom left
U guys (especially americans)thinking u have it all,come and see what we have here,u will be amazed..
More freedom and less crime is just 2 things..
Yes,the taxes can be high,but there is ways to lower it i u really want to,and everybody get free medical attention.For example,no need to pay up 20 000 dollars for an operation..
Education is also free,all included in the tax system.
And if u like stock trading,u pay only 1 procent in tax…
And i didnt mention the best of all,the scandinavian girls…
Yep, objectively speaking, there’s no doubt about it. Scandinavia and Canada are the only “very advanced societies” on the face of this earth. It’s unfortunate that they’re not located in California, south of France, South Africa or New South Wales… then they’d feel the warm caress in both the literal and figurative sense. No, I don’t come from any of these places – unfortunately
After thinking about it, i have come to this conclusion;
The norwegian police dont have money to go after us filesharers, cause they use up their entire budget on investigating and spying on peaceful people who like to smoke pot in their spare time! ;D
Just like to agree with everyone else on here that Norway would be a great place to live if…
1) They got rid of the King.
2) It wasn’t so damn cold there.
3) The government didn’t own half the industry in the country.
Own3d! That’s one of the cool things here in Europe… too bad my country sucks the US of A’s primary genitals so much and employs massive parentalism atm… way to go Norway! Beautiful country, reasonable government.
finally, a country with educated police departement.
If Swedish laws change for the bad, then piratebay can just move their servers to Norway, easy as that
Sharing is not a crime! Sharing is Caring!
Good to know the police act on common sense, responding to the real demands of the people and not to the whims of the rich and powerful.
Hooray, long live Norway. I love reading news like this:)
That m-f looks like a pedophile. Hey! Norwegian cops bust his as and throw him into jail.
@Henry
The oil company in our country “Statoil” is owned by the state hence Stat = State in norwegian.
So the profits go to a fond that the goverment can use as it sees fit.
The state doesn’t run it though, it has its own board and leaders, but the owner is still the the state.
Norway is the best! Come to norway to download
Hei alle fra Norge!
Good decision. Finally a country with some sense ! There are serious crimes that need to be dealt with. Filesharing is last on the list.
Can that lawyer give me money to by original games, movies, etc……because I don’t have it.
THAT is how it should be!!! It is the responsibility of the content owners to chase pirates, NOT the government! If the MPAA/RIAA/Gaming companies don’t want to spend their own money protecting their interests, then let it go.