Investigations have now begun of a popular Icelandic torrent site, capital area police have confirmed.
Morgunblaðið reports that the website, Deildu.net, has recently changed their rules to allow for the posting of torrents of Icelandic material on their site. Until recently, only P2P file sharing of foreign material was allowed.
Friðrik Smári Björgvinsson, the Senior Officer of the Metropolitan Police Investigative Department, told reporters that police have begun their investigation of the site.
Snæbjörn Steingrímsson, the managing director of the Association of Film Rights Holders in Iceland (SMÁÍS), told reporters that Deildu’s new rules were effectively “a declaration of war against creative arts in Iceland.” He also expressed surprise that charges had not been filed sooner.
File sharing is not a new phenomenon in Iceland, and the owners of these sites have different degrees of flexibility when it comes to their relationships with artists. The director of another Icelandic file sharing site, Torrent.is, told the Grapevine in 2007 that if any Icelandic artists contacted him, asking that their material be removed from his site, that they would do so at once.
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