The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
Oscar Swartz reports.
Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison.
Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.
In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.
Sunde, The Pirate Bay's spokesman, announced the news over Twitter Friday morning before the verdict was official. He remained defiant, and offered comfort to supporters. "Stay calm — Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media." The content industry, however, applauded the verdicts.
The two-week trial, which ended March 2, was a joint civil and criminal proceeding that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants, who each faced up to two years in prison. In addition, motion picture and record companies sought $13 million in damages for the 33 movies and music tracks at issue.
The verdicts are a significant symbolic victory for Hollywood, the record labels and the rest of the content industry that claims online piracy costs them billions of dollars in lost sales.
"The Pirate Bay has claimed all the time that their activities are legal," Henrik Pontén, a lawyer who represented the film and computer game companies in the trial, told the Swedish media. "Now that it has been proven illegal we presume that they will stop."
The Pirate Bay crew, though, has vowed to continue running the site whatever happens, and claims that it is secured from a forced shutdown through a network of distributed servers located outside Sweden.
For now, the attention brought by the highly-publicized trial has only made The Pirate Bay more popular. The site has swelled to 22 million users. And thousands of Pirate Bay fans have flocked to sign up for its new $6 anonymization VPN service, which allows torrent feeders and seeders to conduct their business in private without leaving a trace of their internet IP addresses.
And, since the trial began, membership in Sweden's copyright reform Pirate Party has grown 50 percent, while its youth affiliate is now the second largest in Sweden.
Even if The Pirate Bay is ultimately shuttered, dozens of other illicit BiTtorrent tracking services are easily accessible.
The defendants are expected to appeal, and they remain free pending further proceedings.
The defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way BitTorrent works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay's servers. Instead the site merely provided an index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user's client software to the content.
But prosecutor Håkan Roswall argued successfully that the defendants were culpable anyway, citing past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend's coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable.
The verdict could shatter Sweden's reputation as a safe haven for content piracy, coming just weeks after a new law that took effect that allows content owners to force internet service providers to reveal subscriber data in piracy investigations.
But supporters of copyright reform hope that the trial will energize Swedish youth.
One minute after the judgment was public Friday, Sweden's Pirate Party issued a press release claiming: "The verdict is our ticket to the EU Parliament," referring to the election that takes place in the beginning of June.
The party's top candidate, Christian Engström, comments: "Sweden has now outlawed one of our most successful ambassadors. We have long been a leading IT nation but with these kind of actions we will be left behind and become dependent on other nations' arbitrary views."
Reached by e-mail after the verdict, defendant Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's sole comment was: "Like a dog!" — the condemned Josef K's final words in Franz Kafka's The Trial.
In a web-only press conference held two hours after the verdict, Sunde was more upbeat, invoking Hollywood in explaining why he still believes The Pirate Bay's crew will ultimately prevail.
"We see this as a film," he said. "This is the first set-back for the heroes.... In the end we know that the good guys will win, as in all movies."
Several UK mobile broadband providers have started to block access to The Pirate Bay
Several UK mobile broadband providers have started to block access to The Pirate Bay as part of a new voluntary code of practice. The reason for the block is not related to copyright infringement, but most likely due to the fact that there are ‘adult’ torrents hosted on the site.
Starting today, BT Mobile Broadband users are disallowed access to the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet, instead they get a “content blocked” message. This proactive filtering mechanism is part of a voluntary self regulation scheme through which the Internet Watch Foundation hopes to keep children safe from all the horrors of the Internet.
The code of practice identifies several types of content that could be harmful to children, and encourages ISPs to filter these type of sites. Among the filtered content are gambling sites, pornographic material and hacking tutorials. BitTorrent or other file-sharing related sites are not blocked according to the code. It is not clear why The Pirate bay ended up on the block list, but the most plausible reason seems to be their diverse adult torrent collection.
The code doesn’t allow any sexually explicit material, legal or not, and The Pirate Bay does offer ‘links’ to such content, although it doesn’t carry any itself - sound familiar?
The reason why the code is specifically aimed at mobile providers is the increase in mobile devices youngsters have access to without oversight. All sites that have an ‘over 18′ status are included and all access to these sites is simply blocked. Customers who want to lift the block to one of the sites may do so by contacting customer service.
This is not the first time that The Pirate Bay, for one reason or another, has been blocked by Internet service providers. We’ve seen similar things happen in Italy, Turkey, Denmark and several other countries. However, this is the first time that the reason for the blockade is not copyright related.
Whether or not the code will prevent minors from seeing too much flesh is up for debate, but although the comparison between Google and The Pirate Bay has been a hot one this week, one thing is certain - there is a hell of a lot more porn to be found via a Google image search than is to be found on The Pirate Bay.
Failing that there’s always daddy’s porn mags to fall back on - quick, board up the newsstand.
