Illegal posting of a single copyrighted movie on the Internet will cost a 28-year old man in Sweden $652,000 dollars, what the producer Nordisk Film says it would have charged for a license for free distribution.
The fine is the largest ever awarded for uploading of a Swedish movie.
A District Court in Vastmanland County also gave the uploader a suspended jail sentence and ordered him to do 160 hours of community service for sharing more than 500 other films on the Internet, between 2008 and 2011.
The films were posted through the so-called BitTorrent, one of the most common protocols for sharing large files. The protocol breaks up files in smaller pieces and shares them between a large number of users making it easier to transfer huge amounts of data.
Jurisdictions around the world have pursued legal actions against web sites hosting BitTorrents that allow sharing of copyrighted material.