Finland's Supreme Court found the system administrators of Finnish peer-to-peer network Finreactor guilty of piracy on Wednesday.

The seven system administrators were ordered joint responsibility for paying hundreds of thousands of euros in compensation to Teosto, the Finnish composers' copyright society, and 52 others.

The Finreactor network had distributed music, films and games software protected by copyright. Users copied the data files onto their own computers and could then distribute them even further.
The Helsinki Court of Appeals previously convicted the seven systems administrators and four others for assistance. Finland's Supreme Court did not change the verdict regarding their criminal liability.

The convicted administrators appealed against the court ruling on the grounds that they did not possess the individual data files, and did not copy or distribute the files themselves.

Regarding two end-user cases (where the legal question was whether posting a torrent-file to a p2p service means copyright infringement or not) Supreme Court ruled that yes, it does: "since torrent-files are necessary in order to make content files available to the public, posting a torrent-file in Finreactor-service is a relevant act in copyright terms and in copyright infringement".

In the other case, the accused didn't share the content himself (but only posted the torrent). Supreme Court held that this doesn't have any relevance since the offender's intent was to make the content available: "criminal liability cannot be eliminated only by the fact that due to technical solutions of the p2p net, offender's direct participation in making available and reproducing the content files has not been necessary".

What comes to the operators of Finreactor service, Supreme Court held the Turku District Court and Turku Court of Appeal rulings regarding their criminal liability (in direct copyright infringement). Regarding the compensations, Supreme Court stated that prices on legal markets can be taken as basis for compensation calculation. However, the Supreme Court pointed out that legal prices on physical markets cannot be applied directly to Internet environment, and the right holders had failed to provide prices for Internet markets (in 2004, there were not much legal markets on the Internet in Finland).

District Court and Court of Appeals held that compensation less than 100 Euros is so irrelevant that the offenders don't have to pay it. Due to this, most Finnish movie producers were left without any compensation. Now the Supreme Court overruled this by stating that this interpretation doesn’t have any legal basis. This was a victory especially for small-sized Finnish production companies.
Sources: Helsinki Times & the The Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre (CIAPC)