It’s really amazing how fearful people who don’t understand technology are of anyone who has any connection to file sharing, no matter how remote. Over in Sweden, an appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling absolving a web designer of any liability for designing the StudentBay — a torrenting site for educational material — and decided that because he designed the site, he must be liable for what users did on the site. This goes beyond secondary liability into some sort of weird tertiary liability. It already seems odd to blame the operators of the site for actions taken by its users, but now we’re holding the graphic designers responsible too? It’s a sort of scorched earth policy from people who don’t seem to understand how the internet works, and who just seem to want to “destroy everything.” Of course, the end result is that anyone with half a clue just thinks the judicial system is a complete joke. That doesn’t seem useful for anyone.

Seems like plain old secondary liability to me. He’s liable as a contributory infringer if (1) he materially contributed to the infringement, and (2) he had knowledge of it. Sounds like he knowingly designed a website that was used to infringe. I don’t ever understand your “they don’t understand the internet!” argument. Seems like completely empty rhetoric, and you use it way too much. Someone set up a site on purpose so that people would use that site to infringe. Just because you don’t like the fact that the law rightfully holds such people liable for the intended results of their actions, don’t pretend like the judges are a bunch of idiots who don’t understand the internet. They understand it well enough to spot a party who should be held liable for the actions they willingly chose to take.