Posted on 04/17/2009 9:29:17 AM PDT by ShadowAce
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.
However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Will they be tried in the US? I think that’s what we’re currently doing with pirates.
Calling yourself “Pirate Bay” instead of something like “Old MacDonald’s Sever Farm” probably played a part in it.
With all of the RIAA and MPAA lawyers inside the Obama administration, these are the only sort of pirates that he can be expected to crack down on.
Good.
Heh, they didn’t leave themselves much wiggle room with the name, did they?
The headline is glaringly false. They are not in jail. They were sentenced to a jail term but have not even begun the long appeal process. It will be a long time before they are actually jailed if they ever are jailed.
It’s depressing to read some of the past threads on this where FReepers are defending these punks. TPB goes way beyond google or yahoo by being a torrent tracker, openly mocking copyright owners, etc.
if you actually want to stop piracy... suing a website is not the way, since another will pop up just as fast.
go after the search engines. without them, people looking for crackz, serialz, etc wouldn’t know where to look.
yes, people will be able to pass along the urls by word of mouth... but passing information that way is much slower then a general search engine.
besides, google is awash in cash... a very juicy target
Darn.
I wanted to download, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won” this morning.
They should have changed the name “WeBlatantlyHelpPeopleStealStuffAndPissOffGlobalCorprations.com.” Bad week for pirates all around. Don’t Swedish prisons have Xbox 360s and on-site brothels anyway?
In Swedish prison, you can only get weaker hash.
Maybe so, but the same can be said of the "entertainment companies", if you ask me.
Hmm....Thieves or the communist Hollywood scumbags they steal from.....
Tough call.
Too bad they both can’t lose.
I’ve released a lot of my personal music on Pirate Bay.
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