A Swedish court on Friday found the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty, sentencing them to a year in jail. The defendants were also ordered to pay US$3.6 million in damages to copyright holders, among them several American media giants. This according to Swedish media.
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.
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.
After a 13-day trial, Judge Tomas Norström, plus his assistant, and three namndeman (a jury with extended powers), found ample evidence for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are stored on the Web site.
Aside from jail terms, as a result of a civil claim filed alongside the criminal case, the four men will have to pay US$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 four defendants have already vowed to appeal the verdict, and it could take years before the case reaches Sweden's Supreme Court.
This article first appeared as a blog post on CNET News. Mats Lewan reported for CNET News as a 2009 fellow with Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program.
Play video
There are currently no comments for this post.