The Swedish Film Institute (SFI) is in the middle of a crisis after an anti-piracy company revealed that it had tracked several leaked movies on The Pirate Bay back to its servers. Desperate to deflect the accusations, today the SFI made a long statement. It turned out to be a perfect illustration that allegations of piracy based on an IP address and nothing else, simply must be backed up by something more solid.
Early September it came to light that the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) was being sucked into
a scandal.
While monitoring movies leaked to The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy company DoubleTrace said it had discovered that IP addresses in the BitTorrent swarms belonged to none other than the SFI. The drama only escalated when Sweden’s Ministry of Culture and angry movie-industry figures became involved.
After first playing down the news, SFI managing director Bengt Toll later made an announcement which indicated that following an internal audit of firewalls and other logs, no wrong-doing could be found.
Considering the embarrassment of becoming the focus of movie piracy allegations and the importance of dealing with them effectively, some might look at SFI’s initial denial and say, “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
But let’s slow down and take a look at information made available today by the Institute.
Although SFI acknowledge that the IP address (or addresses) logged by DoubleTrace does indeed belong to them, they reveal that it’s hardly trivial to discover the real-life person behind it. Not only do all of SFI’s staff share that IP, but several tenants (such as film and TV producers) do too. And visitors to their library, and visitors to some of their cinemas, and diners in the restaurant, not to mention those using the open WiFi in the cafe and foyer areas.
As indicated by the way they have been proactive in this case by calling in the police, the SFI really seem to want to get to the bottom of the allegations. They say they have firewall logs that could show when and from where in their infrastructure the movies were being shared...
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