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The operators, who were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control, were ordered to pay compensation, damages and expenses of €566,000 to rights holders.

The court convicted the defendants on grounds that they were aware that nearly all the material made available by the service was infringing copyright and that they had acted wilfully. It ruled that the purpose

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of the network was to share as much new content to its users as possible with users required to maintain a minimum ratio of uploaded to downloaded content in order to sustain their accounts.

It rejected the defendants' claim that they were not responsible for copyright infringement since the content was transferred directly between the users and neither stored or transferred by the tracker.

During three months in late 2004 29,625TB of data, equivalent to some 450,000 CDs, were shared through Finreactor, comprising around 16,000 games, 136,000 movies and 274,000 music albums from the service.

In related news, a 23-year-old man from Virginia is the first person to be successfully convicted in the US of helping to run a BitTorrent P2P node. Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in jail and five months home detention for his part in managing the BitTorrent node known as Elite Torrents.