Pirate Bay defendants found guilty
Published: 17 Apr 2009 12:40 BST
The four men who run The Pirate Bay website have been found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement.
The Stockholm District Court sentenced them to a year in prison each and a 30 million kronor (£2.4m) fine to be shared between them.
The trial started on 16 February, with the defence scoring an early victory two days later, as the prosecutor dropped the more-serious charges of actual distribution. The site indexes BitTorrent files that connect to copies of film, music and software files — not the files themselves — and has a claimed 22 million vistors a month.
The four defendants — Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström — had argued that the site was being run as a hobby. Prosecution lawyers claimed that the site made around 10 million kronor a year, and they provided explicit examples of 20 songs, four computer games and nine films that were being infringed. They asked for 124 million kronor in damages.
In a Twitter message, Peter Sunde (@brokep) said: "Stay calm — nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theatre for the media."
The defendants have previously said they would appeal a guilty verdict, and now have three weeks to do so.
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