Swefilmer

» see swefilmer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Swefilmer started on 13 February 2011 and did the thing Swedish courts spent the next decade arguing about. It held no films of its own. It held a catalog, in Swedish, of films and series that somebody else had uploaded to somebody else's servers, and it made its money from the advertising served next to the play button. More than 1,400 films went up between 2011 and the day it closed.

The scale is the part that made it a case rather than a nuisance. At its height Swefilmer was credited with around a quarter of all online video streaming in Sweden, a share no legitimate service in the country had, and during the 2014 arguments about pirate streaming it got named in the same sentence as Dreamfilm and Sweflix as often as those two got named at all. A country of ten million people was watching a meaningful fraction of its television through a site run out of two apartments.

It ended on 31 July 2015. An administrator, Ola Johansson, posted a video saying the site was closing and describing what had happened to him. Police had come to his home and taken his computer and his phone, and they had kept him in custody for ninety hours. Swedish Wikipedia still lists the founder as unknown.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ninety hours ~

Ninety hours is the detail worth holding onto. It is the amount of time the Swedish state needed to hold one person before the largest streaming site in the country switched itself off, with nothing proven in court yet and no seized server photographed for the evening news. The same shape had turned up in Linköping six months earlier with Dreamfilm, where police let an arrested administrator go home and he understood the terms.

~ the landmark trial ~

The main operator was arrested in Germany in early 2016, on a European arrest warrant Sweden had issued the year before and kept sealed, which is how Swedish reporters found out it existed. He was extradited and tried at Varberg District Court alongside a younger co-defendant.

On 15 May 2017 the court convicted the older man, then 26, of copyright infringement and serious money laundering. He got three years in prison and an order to hand over 14 million Swedish kronor as illegal earnings. The 23-year-old got probation with 120 hours of community service. Swedish press called it the biggest film piracy case since the Pirate Bay trial, which it was, and the money-laundering count was the novel part, aimed at what happened to the advertising revenue rather than at the sharing itself.

~ what the appeal changed ~

The court of appeal ruled in late March 2018 and moved everything in both directions at once. The prison term went up from three years to four on a count that settled at 1,044 separate copyright breaches. The forfeiture came down hard in the same ruling, from 14 million kronor to 4 million. The younger man's community service was swapped for a 10,000 kronor fine. Both were ordered to pay 2.2 million Norwegian kroner to Nordisk Film on top of it.

~ the domain for sale ~

Today swefilmer.com answers with a thousand bytes of dark blue. The site name sits in a heading over a line offering to find you information and relevant links, and underneath it a script from a domain brokerage says the name may be for sale. Nobody is farming the old audience, because there is no audience left to farm.

The Swedish market that Swefilmer had a quarter of did not stay empty. Netflix had already launched in Sweden in October 2012, and the broadcasters' own subscription services followed it. By the time the appeal came down, the thing the site had been substituting for could be bought legally for a monthly fee, which is the argument the industry made about every one of these sites and which in this one country the timeline happens to support.

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