Production of the popular Icelandic television show, Sönn íslensk sakamál (‘Real Icelandic Crime’), which chronicles notable Icelandic criminal cases, has been canceled, reportedly due to piracy.
According to the producer and director of the program, Sævar Guðmundsson, illegal downloads of the show have made production unsustainable, Morgunblaðið reports.
The program is available on-demand to subscribers of the station SkjárEinn, which also produces the show. But on the website deildu.net the files are available for free, in violation of copy-right laws. Each episode has been downloaded up to 12,000 times, which greatly undermines sales of subscriptions.
The Icelandic market is small and even deildu.is has long had an honor code which prohibits the sharing of Icelandic materials, as stated on film news website klapptre.is.
That stipulation was changed last year, and repeated requests by the show’s producers to remove the files were refused on the basis that the owner of the files is the only one who can remove them, and not the administrator of the website.
