Pirate Bay Founders Sentenced to Jail, Fines for Violating Copyright Law
A Swedish court found four men behind popular torrent hub the Pirate Bay guilty of breaking copyright law today, and sentenced them to a year in prison and fines of roughly $3 million to be dispersed among entertainment companies like Warner Bros. and Sony, BBC News reports. The four defendants — Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde — said they’d file an appeal and refuse to pay the fine. “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,” a defiant Sunde reportedly said.
The Pirate Bay is perhaps the Internet’s most popular file-sharing Website, with more than a million users a day downloading torrents featuring illegally distributed music, movies and computer programs. The Pirate Bay is so popular, even Prince tried to sue the Website in 2007. While the four men vehemently denied the charges throughout the trial, saying they didn’t actually host any illegal content, an assistant judge in the trial told Swedish radio, “The court first tried whether there was any question of breach of copyright by the file-sharing application and that has been proved, that the offense was committed. The court then moved on to look at those who acted as a team to operate the Pirate Bay file-sharing service, and the court found that they knew that material which was protected by copyright but continued to operate the service.”
When the members of music-sharing site OiNK were arrested by British police and charged with violating copyright law, their cases ended with small fines and community service, so this one-year prison sentence and massive fine seems steep. Sunde hosted an online video conference following the verdicts, holding up an IOU to the camera and telling viewers, “That’s as close as they are going to get to any money from us,” Billboard.biz reports.
Sunde added that Google will also one day have to face Sweden’s court as they are considered a conduit for copyright-breaking material, and that the four men would have a post-verdict party tonight in Malmo, Sweden. “This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours,” a lawyer for Lundstrom reportedly said.