Swedish court overturns beIN copyright win
In a loss for Qatari broadcaster beIn Sports, a Swedish court has reversed the sentences of three men found to have infringed its content, finding that Qatar was not a signatory to an international treaty at the time of the alleged IP violation.
The Patent and Market Court of Appeal in Stockholm ruled that while the trio had infringed copyrighted content on the now defunct Advanced TV Network (ATN) in 2016, these rights could not be enforced.
This was because Qatar only signed up to the Rome Convention a year after the alleged infringement took place in 2016, the court held in a ruling first reported by Torrentfreak.
The Rome Convention is an international treaty that protects the rights of broadcasters around the globe.
Under the treaty, the convention “secures protection in performances for performers, in phonograms for producers of phonograms and in broadcasts for broadcasting organisations”.
Six years ago, the Swedish authorities launched a criminal investigation based on the complaints levelled by beIN Sports and Albanian TV group Digitalb accusing ATN of illegally disseminating content, including English Premier League soccer.
The investigation discovered that ATN listed more than a thousand channels enabling subscribers to watch content without satellite dishes.
The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm determined in June 2018 that several of ATN’s employees were guilty of copyright infringement, and of decoding of broadcast signals without the appropriate permission.
“It is, according to the court’s opinion, shown beyond reasonable doubt that ATN at no time ... had the rights to broadcast the beIN channels in question,” the court ruled in the verdict.
The court sentenced ATN owner Hamid al-Hamid to two and a half years in prison, and ordered him to pay more than 209 million Swedish kroner ($21 million) in damages to the companies.
But the Patent and Market Court of Appeal overturned the prison sentences and damages after the court held that the earlier ruling was invalid.
In a press release, the court stated that: “In a criminal case about [the] infringement of the so-called signalling right that accrues to radio and television companies according to section 48 of the Copyright Act, the prosecutions and related individual claims have been rejected on the grounds that the broadcasts have taken place from countries in the Middle East and that there has been no legally relevant connection to Sweden.”
It added that the indictment for the infringement of the signalling right for satellite broadcasting from Albania has also been dismissed, noting that there is currently a trial in Albania between the broadcaster and ATN centring on the implications of an earlier broadcasting rights agreement.
But the court did uphold charges that ATN infringed an EU trademark in connection with the rebroadcasting of certain TV channels.
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