A 15-year-old boy in Sweden is facing up to two years in jail because the head teacher at his school reported him to police for illegal file downloading.

The piracy came to light when a technician at a Gothenberg school traced the introduction of a virus on the school network back to the boy’s computer. On scanning the drive he located 24 movies including The Mechanic, The Social Network, and The Fighter. He proceeded to report the finding to the head teacher.

Rather than call the boy in for a chat and discuss punishment for both introducing the virus and downloading illegal files, the head teacher instead called the police and had the kid arrested. Apparently, the policy of the school is to call the police if a crime is committed.

Now the boy is facing a rather severe punishment of up to 2 years in jail, although if he’s lucky his parents will just have to find the cash to pay a large fine.

The case is unique because no one this young has ever been targeted for prosecution before, but that doesn’t mean it will be thrown out. The Swedish Pirate Party obviously disagrees and believes it should never have got as far as the courts in the first place.

One key aspect of the case is that it hinges on the boy sharing the movies as well as downloading them because of the way BitTorrent works. Even though he didn’t realize this was happening, it does mean he was distributing stolen goods as well as downloading them in the first place.

The obvious question this brings up is should we be putting teenagers, or in fact anyone, in jail for downloading content illegally? Or is it time for the law to be revised and some other form of punishment introduced that still acts as a deterrent, but doesn’t remove individuals from society?

Although the boy is to blame for what he did, you do have to question the actions of the head teacher. Did this really need to be a police matter? Why not instead discuss with the boy what could happen next and make him understand how serious what he had done was.