“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,” Oscar Swartz reports for Wired.
“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,” Swartz reports.
“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,” Swartz reports.
“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,” Swartz reports.
“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,” Swartz reports.
“The Pirate Bay crew 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,” Swartz reports.
“Even if The Pirate Bay is ultimately shuttered, dozens of other illicit BiTtorrent tracking services are easily accessible,” Swartz reports. “The defendants are expected to appeal, and they remain free pending further proceedings.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You cannot stop this, Hollywood. Use the epically stupid music cartel as your guide as to what not to do. Hollywood should make their content available and transferrable among devices at reasonable prices and honest people will buy. You will make more money that way than by fruitlessly fighting piracy — you’ll never catch ’em all, not even a small percentage of them — coupled with trying to sell over-priced, DRM’ed movies as you’re currently doing (iTunes Store and Apple TV included).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “mks1” for the heads up.]
