Pirate Bay founders sentenced in Sweden

[Tiriol]

Meanwhile in Sweden, as reported by BBC News.

Pirate Bay founders found guilty

Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal
A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor (£2.4m) in damages.

In a Twitter posting, Sunde said: "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media."

Sunde went on to say that he "got the news last night that we lost".

"It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

However, the total awarded fell short of the 117m kronor (£9m) in damages and interest the firms were seeking.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

"These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

"The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn't even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said.

The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong.

Speaking to the BBC earlier this week, Sunde said that there was no difference between us and Google."

"The Pirate Bay will continue. Nothing is going to happen if we lose, for a multitude for reasons, not least because we will immediately appeal," he said.

A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence.

"That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."

Political issue

Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was "a gross injustice".

"This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.

"There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it.

"Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament."

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.

Im actually in agreement that this was, more or less, a political issue and decision: the Pirate Bay founders were, in effect, sentenced because they provided the infrastructure through which some of the Pirate Bay's users spread questionable material. I'm not even sure if the founders got even a dime out of it, and yet they have to pay outrageous sum of money. I didn't find it particularly surprising that they will appeal.

[Zac Naloen]

They called it the Pirate Bay, what were they expecting?

Despite their flawless explanation of how they aren't guilty of actually sharing anything, they marketed the site as somewhere to get illegal stuff.

[Genii Lodus]

It's an absurd legal precedent being set to say that pointing people to illegal stuff is a crime because then every search engine should also be sued to death. How they marketed it doesn't matter, it's still not doing anything that should be regarded as illegal. 'Enabling of copyright theft' would be an absurd crime to put on the books - there's hardly anything that can't be used for copyright theft.

I hope they get off on appeal, I think the verdict's a travesty after the prosecution's total incompetence at presenting a case.

[Zac Naloen]

It wouldn't be necessarily be called "enabling of copyright theft". "Accessory to copyright theft" would be a more accurate sentence.

Sounds to me like they are guilty of KNOWINGLY providing a source for pirated material not inadvertantly doing so, like google.

[Julhelm]

Totally absurd ruling. Just goes to show how far the media mafia are willing to go to protect an obsolete business model.

[Eleas]

My disgust isn't reserved for the judgement itself (the Pirate Bay provided a service, yes, but so does a getaway driver from a bank heist), but the political reasons behind it. It was essentially a hatchet job ordered by US corporations, and Sweden chose to fold. That is reprehensible, because we would never have bothered if we weren't threatened as a country by a cabal of smug extortionists.

I find if particularly funny that a representative of the porn industry would so sanctimoniously accuse TPB's leadership of being in it for the money; their whole business model is built on profiting from other people's misery and repressed sexuality, and the only reason they're not completely out of control is because even US laws are occasionally enforced against people with money. The "harm" spoken of sounds like bullshit, too: even the most expensive porn flick such as Pirates has a budget at best equivalent to that of a low-grade B movie. These movies sell like hotcakes, and cost nothing to produce. Tell me again why I should weep for these assholes?

[Bounty]

I find if particularly funny that a representative of the porn industry would so sanctimoniously accuse TPB's leadership of being in it for the money; their whole business model is built on profiting from other people's misery and repressed sexuality, and the only reason they're not completely out of control is because even US laws are occasionally enforced against people with money. The "harm" spoken of sounds like bullshit, too: even the most expensive porn flick such as Pirates has a budget at best equivalent to that of a low-grade B movie. These movies sell like hotcakes, and cost nothing to produce. Tell me again why I should weep for these assholes?

Phonographic != pornographic

[Eleas]

I find if particularly funny that a representative of the porn industry would so sanctimoniously accuse TPB's leadership of being in it for the money; their whole business model is built on profiting from other people's misery and repressed sexuality, and the only reason they're not completely out of control is because even US laws are occasionally enforced against people with money. The "harm" spoken of sounds like bullshit, too: even the most expensive porn flick such as Pirates has a budget at best equivalent to that of a low-grade B movie. These movies sell like hotcakes, and cost nothing to produce. Tell me again why I should weep for these assholes?

Phonographic != pornographic

Oh Jesus fuck, that might just be the dumbest misreading I've made in my life. I blame my sleep patterns.

Well, to salvage the situation and salve my ego, I'd like to point out the many commonalities between the two, plus the fact that the record companies' modus operandi also involves fucking people up every orifice.

[Big Orange]

The tighter they squeeze upon their material, the more they'll lose it through illegitimate piracy. They will just unnecessarily set up more hoops for the alienated consumers to leap through anyway. Ironically the less restrictive they are with copyrighted material the more legitmate control they'll have over it and media piracy would be more easily eroded.

[Darth Wong]

Oh noes! People who deliberately tried to encourage and facilitate software piracy got caught despite their attempt to find a clever loophole in the wording of the law! Oh, the injustice!

Grow the fuck up, people. We all know what they were doing.

[Solauren]

Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took this long for the Pirate Bay to get nailed.

I have to wonder if the companies will attempt to have them shipped to the United States to be charged there now.

[Eleas]

Oh noes! People who deliberately tried to encourage and facilitate software piracy got caught despite their attempt to find a clever loophole in the wording of the law! Oh, the injustice!

Grow the fuck up, people. We all know what they were doing.

Who's surprised? I'm just annoyed at who finally drove nail in. It should be our government doing that by ourselves, not corporate interests from overseas. The first I could countenance; the second offends me.

[bilateralrope]

Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took this long for the Pirate Bay to get nailed.

I have to wonder if the companies will attempt to have them shipped to the United States to be charged there now.

I wouldn't say that the Pirate Bay has been nailed until the website goes down or changes how it operates. But it looks like the judgement is just a sum of money that they can afford to pay.

[Darth Onasi]

So basically it all comes down to..

The Pirate Bay founders: Yar! We're pirates!

The authorities: You're nicked!

The Pirate Bay founders: Hey! Stop treating us like pirates!

[MKSheppard]

I think they brought it on themselves by being openly contemptuous of the people who sent them legal threats, posting them on the site and openly mocking them. That probably kept the pressure on them.

[Gigaliel]

So basically it all comes down to..

The Pirate Bay founders: Yar! We're pirates!

The authorities: You're nicked!

The Pirate Bay founders: Hey! Stop treating us like pirates!

They're going for an appeal and I don't think they've complained beyond saying the ruling was wrong.

I think they brought it on themselves by being openly contemptuous of the people who sent them legal threats, posting them on the site and openly mocking them. That probably kept the pressure on them.

Doubtful. There were several tracker hosting sites that all went down before them. The main point of this was sealing up the big hole in copyright enforcement that was Sweden.

And Pirate Bay won't be going down if their supervillain-sized computer network is to be believed. One was tried in absentia because he lives in Thailand maintaining the things, so I wouldn't rule it out.

[Solauren]

Supervillian sized network?

MAHAHAHAH.

Oh man, that's rich.

It's probably 2 - 3 servers, at MOST. You don't need alot of processing power to run a tracker site.

A server with a 3.6 ghz processor and 4 Gigabytes of ram, on a T-1 line or faster, should be able to do it.

[TheKwas]

Quite frankly, I'm surprised it took this long for the Pirate Bay to get nailed.

I have to wonder if the companies will attempt to have them shipped to the United States to be charged there now.

I wouldn't say that the Pirate Bay has been nailed until the website goes down or changes how it operates. But it looks like the judgement is just a sum of money that they can afford to pay.

Not to mention the two founders face time in a 'swedish' prison, which is more like a prepaid 3 star hotel than what any North American would typically associate with the word 'prison'.

Don't get me wrong, the system works great for most purposes (certainly much better than the North American prison complex), but it doesn't provide much deterrent for political prisoners.

[Gigaliel]

Supervillian sized network?

MAHAHAHAH.

Oh man, that's rich.

Well that's the way they put it. There was always a kind of faux mustache-twirling when they talked about it. I mean they try for the 'besieged hero' thing, but that doesn't work when you call yourself a pirate and publish a list of ignored legal threats.

It's probably 2 - 3 servers, at MOST. You don't need alot of processing power to run a tracker site.

A server with a 3.6 ghz processor and 4 Gigabytes of ram, on a T-1 line or faster, should be able to do it.

I am not well versed in this sort of thing, but I feel this number is absurdly low. More computers were confiscated in that raid on their servers way back.

[phongn]

It's probably 2 - 3 servers, at MOST. You don't need alot of processing power to run a tracker site.

A server with a 3.6 ghz processor and 4 Gigabytes of ram, on a T-1 line or faster, should be able to do it.

The database loads alone would be horrendous.

[Mr Bean]

The database loads alone would be horrendous.

Explain that, tracker files are generally much less then a meg(Lets say 1 meg for reference sake). I know Databases can be hell when your talking bout pages that weigh in at several hundred megs of formals and data and total weigh in at the multi-gigabyte range. I don't deal with such professional but I know databases for your average mid-size company can be hell on storage space. But you are talking about thousands of tiny differential files which need only be downloaded once then the load is off Bit-torrents website how bad could it be? I'm thinking it needs more than a T-1 line sure but not all hundred million files are being downloaded at once. They might see a million downloads an hour(I have no idea on the Pirate Bay's traffic) but surely you'd be able to run the whole thing off less than a dozen computers? Maybe even a single rack if you squeeze it?

[phongn]

They have to dynamically serve all their pages. They run a search engine. Torrents are being added and removed, this is not static content.

[Thanas]

Not to mention the two founders face time in a 'swedish' prison, which is more like a prepaid 3 star hotel than what any North American would typically associate with the word 'prison'.

Are you swedish and have you ever seen one? If not, where do you think you got the experience to declare prisons a prepaid 3 star hotel? I have been in 3 star hotels and I don't believe for one second prison is even close to that.

[Darth Wong]

Not to mention the two founders face time in a 'swedish' prison, which is more like a prepaid 3 star hotel than what any North American would typically associate with the word 'prison'.

Are you swedish and have you ever seen one? If not, where do you think you got the experience to declare prisons a prepaid 3 star hotel? I have been in 3 star hotels and I don't believe for one second prison is even close to that.

Obviously, he is engaging in hyperbole. However, it is doubtful that they are as brutal as American prisons, where prisoners are packed into facilities designed to handle half as many inmates as they are currently housing, and it is not uncommon for new inmates to be forced into a "turning out room" where they are beaten and raped.

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/

Of course, proponents of this treatment have little explanation for the fact that people who come out of this system have such a high recidivism rate. If their theories are correct, the brutality should leave them "scared straight" and terrified of ever committing a crime again.

[Thanas]

Sure, but the point of "hotel" somehow makes me think of soft beds, freedom to move around in a decent room, television, running hot and cold water, no cellmates, freedom of association, decent meals etc.

Of course swedish prisons are better than the USA. Still, I doubt any sane person who is there actually enjoyes it.