The Swedish trial of the four members of Pirate Bay is now over, and the pirates are going to jail. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty and were sentenced to a year in the slammer for violating copyright and running the most notorious file sharing site on the web.
From the BBC here:
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 $4.5m (£3m) in damages.
Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.
Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as “bizarre. “ “It’s serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It’s really serious. And that’s a bit weird,” Sunde said. “It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.
“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”
The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.
The Pirate Bay’s first server is now a museum exhibit in Stockholm. 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.
Way to stay defiant, Sunde. Maybe that attitude and a pack of smokes can get you more time “in the yard” in the Swedish jail.
Look, even if Pirate Bay never hosted a single file, there are pieces of information, that once assembled, become illegal. That is a concept that online anarchists like Sunde can’t come to grips with. Showing people how to violate copyright laws is an example of this concept. Compiling privacy information by a government to be used to track people would be another.