Dreamfilm

» see dreamfilm.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In January 2015 the Swedish International Prosecutor's Chamber moved on four sites at once. Dreamfilm, Tankafetast, Piratehub and TFPlay all belonged to roughly the same handful of people, and five of them were now suspects. On 23 January a 21-year-old man was arrested in Linköping. He was questioned and then released, and the terms of the release were the whole operation: shut the site and walk out of this, or leave it online and come back into custody.

Dreamfilm had started in the spring of 2012. Four men built it, one of them the owner working behind aliases while the other three handled the advertising and the day-to-day running of it. The site itself held no films. It held links, pointed at servers elsewhere where somebody had already uploaded the film or the series without asking anyone, which in 2012 was a distinction Swedish courts had not yet finished arguing about. It made more than a million kronor in ad revenue across about a year.

The site went dark in the first days of February 2015, and SVT reported it gone on the fifth. The prosecutor's own summary of what had happened was flat and slightly proud: "Det är inte vi som tagit ner sajterna, det är de själva", which is to say that the operators had done it to themselves. Within days a replacement called Dreamfilmhd.com appeared, registered in Panama, which is what everybody involved must have expected.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ultimatum ~

The mechanism here is worth sitting with, because it is cheaper than everything the film industry had been trying for fifteen years. No seizure of hardware in three countries, no five-year argument about whether a link counts as a copy. One man in an interview room, and one sentence about what tomorrow looks like. The site was not taken offline by the state. It was taken offline by somebody the state had just let go home.

~ what the court took ~

Linköping District Court ruled on 9 May 2017 in case B 226-15, brought with Walt Disney and Svensk Filmindustri among the plaintiffs. All four men were convicted on 45 films' worth of copyright infringement. The sentences ran from six to ten months in prison and the damages came to 1.3 million kronor, which is more than the site ever made. The court also ordered the domain name forfeited, a remedy Swedish courts had been testing since the Pirate Bay case and which turns a piece of registry data into seizable property.

None of this was the shape the same fight took in Turkey. Here the instrument was administrative rather than criminal: under law 5651 a site could be blocked by order, at the DNS layer, without anyone being charged with anything, so the Turkish version of Dreamfilm died a dozen times and came back a dozen times at an address one character different. Sweden sent four men to prison and kept the domain. That is a much smaller number of deaths and a much more final one, and it took five years to arrive.

~ the name that stayed ~

Dreamfilm.se answers today, under its own name, with a title reading Välkommen till Dreamfilm.se. It is a WordPress site now and it is about Swedish film, in the specific sense that it publishes cast lists. Hundreds of them. Rollistan i this, rollistan i that, running down the page through every Swedish series and comedy anyone ever searched for.

So the domain kept the name and it kept the subject, and the only thing it dropped was the films. Someone worked out that the residual search traffic from a dead pirate site is worth more than the films ever were, because you can sell advertising against a cast list without going to prison for it.

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