The Pirate Bay Four have been hit with a prison term and a hefty fine after a Swedish court found them guilty of violating copyright laws.
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were each sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay, collectively, damages of $4.5 million. The amount were considerably lower than the $17.5 million the group of entertainment companies was seeking but International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Chairman John Kennedy was pleased by the verdict, saying, “These guys weren’t making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behavior, it was reprehensible.”
“The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn’t even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did,” he continued. “There has been a perception that piracy is okay and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”
The group intends to appeal the verdict and Sunde said they would refuse to pay any fines levied against them regardless. “It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organized. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganized crime,” he said. “We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”
“[The verdict] is outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal,” added Per Samuelson, a lawyer for Carl Lundstrom. “This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours.”
The Pirate Bay was founded in 2003 by PiratbyrÃ¥n (The Piracy Bureau), a Swedish group that supports a global movement against copyright laws, but has been run as an independent operation since October 2004. The site claims to be the the world’s largest bittorrent tracker, but has consistently maintained that because it has only torrent files and does not host any actual copyrighted material, it cannot be prosecuted for copyright violations.
Source: BBC
