Pirate Bay defendants found guilty

Pictured, from left, are Pirate Bay defendants Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Carl Lundström is not pictured.

A Swedish court on Friday found the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty, sentencing each to a year in jail. The defendants were also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants.

The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.

"The crime has been committed in a commercial and organized form," Judge Tomas Norström said in a Web broadcast from a press conference in Stockholm.
Warg and Neij are the founders of The Pirate Bay. Sunde is a programmer and a spokesman there, and Lundström offered technical services to the site in 2005.

The Web site--one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world--offers a search engine for torrents that can be used for file sharing. It also offers a tracker, which is a server that keeps file swappers linked.

(BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and by some estimates it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire Internet.^[1]

The protocol works initially when a file provider makes his file (or group of files) available to the network. This is called a seed and allows others, named peers, to connect and download the file. Each peer who downloads a part of the data makes it available to other peers to download. After the file is successfully downloaded by a peer, many continue to make the data available, becoming additional seeds. This distributed nature of BitTorrent leads to a viral spreading of a file throughout peers. As more seeds get added, the likelihood of a successful connection increases exponentially. Relative to standard Internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.)

After a 13-day trial, judge Tomas Norström, plus his assistant and three namndeman (essentially a jury with extended powers), found ample evidence for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are stored on the Web site.

As a result of a civil claim filed alongside the criminal case, the four men will have to pay $3.6 million in compensation for lost sales to 17 media companies. Among them are Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Entertainment, and Activision.

The largest portion of that total is allotted to Twentieth Century Fox ($1.3 million), followed by Columbia Pictures ($504,000) and Warner Bros. ($300,000).

The four defendants have already vowed to appeal the verdict, and it could take years before the case reaches Sweden's Supreme Court.

"This is a victory for the prosecutor so far, but this is just the first round," said Jonas Nilsson, the defense attorney for Fredrik Neij, according to Swedish News Agency TT. The $3.6 million in damages is extreme in a Swedish case, Nilsson told TT.

Copyright holders cheer Pirate Bay verdict

Both copyright holders and some Pirate Bay supporters see opportunities to promote their causes as a result of the verdict handed down Friday in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case.

The large penalty--$3.6 million in damages to be paid to the copyright holders--will likely discourage illegal file sharers, according to those in the music business. In addition, each of the four defendants, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom, were sentenced to a year in jail.

Reaction in the United States from those in the music and movie industries was tempered by the fact that the legal process has a long way to go. Still, Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters' Guild of America, said he and everybody else "put out of business by cyber-looting" was smiling after the verdict.

"I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years," Carnes said. "They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn't involve profiting from stolen property...What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.

"They are turning the Internet into a cyber Somalia," Carnes continued, "and that doesn't do any good for anybody."

Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said the Swedish court's decision should serve as a reminder to those who illegally share files. "Piracy can sound romantic and glamorous, but as this decision reminds the world--digital theft is illegal, damaging and for those convicted, consequential," Bainwol said.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying group for the film industry, called the decision a victory for copyright owners.

We welcome the court's decision today because The Pirate Bay is a source of immense damage to the creative industries in Sweden and internationally," the MPAA said in a statement. "This is an important decision for rights-holders, underlining their right to have their creative works protected against illegal exploitation."

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry expressed hope for new music downloading services to replace Pirate Bay.

"This is a very interesting signal to the entrepreneurs who are about to launch better services that are legal so the consumers can get even better alternative," Ludvig Werner, chairman of IPFI Sweden, told Swedish Public Radio SR.

The Pirate Party political group--which has been supporting Pirate Bay and thus has gained popularity among the large number of file sharers in Sweden--also sees the verdict as an opportunity. The verdict is the "ticket to get elected to European parliament" in June, the Pirate Party said in a press release.

An estimated one in 10 people in the Nordic country engaged in file sharing last year.

The Antipiracy Agency, an organization based in Sweden that's supported by a consortium of film and game organizations to fight Internet piracy, welcomed the verdict and wants the authorities to finally act on the Pirate Bay site, which for the moment is still up and running.

"Now it is an urgent matter for the authorities to act on Pirate Bay's illegal activities," Henrik Pontén, a lawyer at the Antipiracy Agency, said in a press statement after the verdict. "Today's verdict clarifies the legal position."