James Delahunty
9 Jul 2006 10:03
According to an article on the Swedish site, The Local, the downfall of The Pirate Bay could lie in advertisement revenue. According to Swedish prosecutors, if the site is earning money from its work, it could face tougher laws. In May, a raid on the site only managed to keep it down for a matter of days and police are still wading through the servers looking for anything they can use against the site.
According to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, hundreds of thousands of kronor are being made each month from advertisers. Companies are usually unwilling to advertise on BitTorrent Tracker sites but when those sites are extremely popular, one of the Internet's most popular sites in fact, that stance tends to change.
"If there is money left over, it will go to us who work at Pirate Bay as salaries," site founder Fredrik Neij said to Svenska Dagbladet on Wednesday. He added that he plans to invest money in the site to prevent police from taking it down again. Police will be looking at the book keeping and payments made with a focus on advertising revenue and taxes.
"It is going to be an entirely different penalty if it turns out they earn money through their work," prosecutor Håkan Roswall said, according to Svenska Dagbladet. "We could also end up using material from other companies that have had a relationship with them." However, the core question around the Pirate Bay is still whether or not the site is legal.
The site never hosted any copyrighted material or offered it for download, only torrent files could be found. If the site is legal then why should revenue matter? Indeed, other P2P services have been targeted because of money the site gathered, like ShareReactor for example. Once the premier ed2k indexing site, it was shut down in 2004 shortly after the administration received thousands in donations to help keep the site running.
Anti-piracy groups used these donations as a weapon against the site, and through lies forced the Swiss authorities to raid the site. In reality, the site was in debt and the estimates given by the group were very far off. That case is still ongoing. You can read an interview we had with the owner some months after the raid.
Source:
The Local