More of copyright’s main antagonists have been facing stiff sentences this week as the file-sharing swashbucklers behind The Pirate Bay have been denied a reduced punishment by Sweden’s supreme courts.
Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundstrom are the crew which runs the offending Swedish website which boasts the claim of “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement”. “TPB”, as it is often abbreviated, hosts torrent files and magnet links for music, movies, software and other gaming wares online for illegal download through programmes such as BitTorrent.
Visitors to the site can freely download pretty much anything they can think of in a virtual One Eyed Willy’s galleon full of illegitimate booty and registered users can offer files to be shared and seeded (sharing of a complete file). The Pirate Bay has been in operation since 2003 and has had a number of run-ins with the law in the past, including one notable case in 2009 where all four men were charged with assistance to copyright infringement and face one year in prison and a fine of 30-million Swedish Krona. The case was overturned when the judge was accused of bias and the marauders of the internet high seas were free to sail again.
The most recent sentencing has been appealed against and each of the men involved, at present, face already reduced sentences of four to ten months imprisonment with a 46-million krona bounty to be repaid for “damages” to the entertainment industry. After failing to be heard by the Swedish courts the next stop for The Pirate Bay founders will be the European Court of Justice in a last ditch appeal on their sentencing.
Copyright and file-sharing has become the talk of the tech town since the impending SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) threat arose to cast a black cloud over our internet using, until a decision on it becoming law was successfully swayed at the zero hour.
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