Swedish Pirates Convicted

As we covered March 5th in “Swedish Pirates on Trial“, today was verdict day for The Pirate Bay Four. The four defendants were accused of “assisting in making copyright content available”. This morning the verdict was returned.

Peter Sunde: Guilty
Fredrik Neij: Guilty.
Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty.
Carl Lundström: Guilty.
Each received 1 year in jail and $905,000 each in damages.

All four will appeal the decision.

The court said that the four were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as “severe”. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this.

Roger Wallis, who spoke in favor of The Pirate Bay at the trial, noted “This will cause a flood of court cases. Against all the ISPs. Because if these guys assisted in copyright infringements, then the ISPs also did. This will have huge consequences. The entire development of broadband may be stalled.”

Editorial note: you can find the same torrents in many other places, including Google. Presumably employees of Google will now be subject to fines in Sweden for torrents they list. Presumably the Swedes will also hold Google responsible when it lists pages containing libelous content, bomb-making instructions, hate speech, etc. etc.

The bottom line: this was a political prosecution, backed by powerful interests. It will be appealed, and hopefully higher courts will hold themselves to a higher standard – a legal standard perhaps. The Pirates are not perfect, but in this case they are right.