Arabian internet TV outfit fined for pirating Premier League matches.getty images
A Swedish court ordered a bankrupt Arabic internet TV company to pay 210M Swedish krona ($24M) "in damages for distributing content" including the Premier League without permission, according to Vaish & Dickson of REUTERS. The Stockholm district court ordered Sweden-based Advanced TV Network, which distributes Arabic-language content over the internet, to pay 194.8M krona ($22.2M) in damages to Qatar’s beIN Sports and 14.6M krona ($1.6M) to Albanian TV group DigitAlb. In a verdict dated June 29, the court said, "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 Stockholm court also sentenced ATN Owner Hamid al-Hamid, 58, to two-and-a-half years in prison, while his son Ahmed and another business associate were sentenced to one year each. All three were found guilty of charges "including misuse of decoding information and copyright violations" (REUTERS, 7/4).
