The Register:

Twenty-two people were convicted of internet piracy in Finland last week.
A judge in Turku ordered them to pay fines and more than €420,000 in damages for copyright offences – about €19,000 each.
All 22, some of whom are still under the age of 18, were operators or administrators of Finnish BitTorrent tracker Finreactor.
In its ruling, the court said the administrators had intentionally created the service to violate copyright law. The court rejected the defendants’ claim that as operators of the service they were not responsible for the infringement since the content was transferred directly between the users and no infringing content was either stored or transferred through the tracker.

The court argued that the service should be seen as a whole and the convicted defendants “were directly and essentially involved in the infringing activities”.