Finreactor

~ the eulogy ~

The Finreactor domain was registered on 22 January 2003, about eighteen months after BitTorrent existed at all. It was a private tracker in Finnish, for Finns, and it never tried to be anything else. Around ten thousand people had accounts. That is a small number next to the trackers people remember, and inside a country of five million it is not small at all.

Police shut it down on 14 December 2004. The complaint had been filed by a law firm acting for software vendors including Microsoft and Adobe, and the National Bureau of Investigation seized machines from admins across the country on the same day. During one stretch of monitoring in the autumn of 2004, investigators measured 296.25 terabytes moving through the tracker over three and a half months, which is the figure that ended up carrying the damages calculation for the next six years.

What made Finreactor matter was never its size. It was that Finland decided to prosecute the people who ran the index rather than the people who downloaded, and then followed that decision all the way up. Thirty two individuals were charged: owners, developers, user admins, forum moderators. Moderating a message board became a criminal act with a number attached to it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ratio ~

Finreactor ran the mechanism every private tracker has run since. You had to upload in proportion to what you took. Fall behind and a warning came, keep falling behind and the account went away. It is a clean piece of incentive design and it is also the thing that convicted people, because enforcing a share ratio is hard to describe as passive hosting once a prosecutor gets hold of it.

In 2004 I was in Turkey on TTNet, in the years when an internet cafe was where a lot of downloading actually happened. The tracker shape was everywhere and Finreactor was not part of it here. A Finnish-language site with a closed signup was a national object by design, which is exactly why it drew a national police operation and why nobody outside Finland noticed for years.

~ what the supreme court decided ~

The Turku District Court heard the admins in late September 2006 and convicted 21 of them, with fines of a few hundred euros each and joint damages of roughly 420,000 euros. The appeals court upheld it on 19 June 2008 with small changes, and reclassified most of the convictions from assisting infringement to infringement itself, which is a heavier thing to have on paper.

On 30 June 2010 the Supreme Court of Finland raised the collective damages to 700,000 euros against seven administrators and held plainly that distributing torrent metadata files is copyright infringement in its own right, a step past anything a Finnish court had said before. A separate round of user trials had already run through 2006 and 2007, with 26 downloaders drawing small fines and costs. The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden was argued three years after the Finreactor verdicts existed, and the Finnish case had already answered several of the questions Stockholm was still debating.

~ the ages in the file ~

Most of the people in the court documents were teenagers or barely past it when the servers came down. Two of the admins were still minors at conviction and were fined amounts reported at tens of thousands of euros each. Nobody in the group made money from the tracker and nobody claimed a political position about copyright; they were running a hobby with a membership system, and the hobby turned out to carry six-figure liability.

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