The Danish Anti-Piracy Group applied to the courts today (July 13) for an injunction, which would force telecom company Tele2 to prohibit close connections to the rogue Russian music download service AllofMP3.
“This is an attempt to stop illegal downloading in Denmark, and to stop it quickly,” said Jesper Bay, marketing director for IFPI Denmark, which is a Danish APG member. “Other Internet service providers are doing it, so we hope this will get them to stop similar activities freely or else we’ll have to go the legal route.”
Bay added that he hopes APG can enter into talks with Tele2.
The British recording industry was recently given permission by the U.K. High Court to serve proceedings against the allegedly-illegal AllofMP3.com service, which sells downloads of frontline album titles for between $1-$2.
A spokesperson for the Swedish-originated Tele2, which boasts 750,000 subscribers in Denmark, said it was too early to make any comments on the injunction. It declared, however, that Tele2 had been singled out.
The injunction application follows a Feb. 10 Danish Supreme Court decision to uphold a lower court ruling. The earlier ruling stated that local ISPs must terminate Internet connections to customers who illegally downloaded copyrighted works.
The case had applied provisions in the European Union’s copyright directive and is expected to establish a precedent that other EU member countries are expected to follow.
The Tele2 spokesman believes that the APG’s action was not strictly in-line with the Supreme Court decision and that similar APG actions would also been needed against all providers in Denmark.
“No rights holders-neither artists, songwriters, publishers or record companies-have approved of AllofMP3’s selling music,” the AGP said in a statement. “And no rights holders have received payment for the millions of tracks that have been sold through the service in the past few years.”
The Danish Anti Piracy-Group consists of the members of: IFPI Denmark, Danish Video Distributors Assn., Danish Film Distributors Assn., KODA (Composers, Publishers and Songwriters in Denmark), Nordic Copyright Bureau, the Danish Musicians’ Union and the Danish Artists Assn.
