James Delahunty
17 Apr 2009 8:21
A Stockholm court has found the four founders of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal sharing through the site. The four were found guilty of assisting distribution of illegal content and were sentenced to a year in jail. They also must pay a fine of $3.6 million to 17 different music and media companies including Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Warner, MGM and 20th Century Fox.
The case was brought against TPB, which claimed 22 million concurrent users in February, by an International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)-led consortium of media companies. All four defendants have pledged to appeal the decision. "Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so ever. This is just a theatre for the media," said Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
He continued: "Really, it's a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release." On the other side the reaction was a mixture of relief and delight. "We're very pleased at the verdict of what was a very important case for us," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of IFPI. "It would have been very difficult to put on a brave face if we had lost, but this verdict sends a strong educational and deterrent message."
Supporters of the The Pirate Bay held a street party in Moscow last night, saying the companies behind the trial were, "motivated only by their greed and inertia, want to prevent people sharing music, movies, or anything, on a purely altruistic basis". The trial began on February 16 in Stockholm, and by the second day the original charge of "assisting copyright infringement" was dropped and replaced with a lesser charge of "assisting making available copyrighted content", after the prosecutors failed to convince the Judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site itself.
Below you can view the Pirate Bay press conferences.