17/02/2009

What has been described as the trial of the decade and the biggest anti-piracy case ever began yesterday in a Stockholm courtroom. Four men from the world’s most notorious file-sharing site, Pirate Bay, are being charged with breaking copyright laws.

The defendants are founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde and Swedish dotcom millionaire Carl Lundström, one of Pirate Bay’s donors. They face up to two years in prison and a fine of SEK 1.2m (€110,000) in compensation and damages to plaintiffs from the music and film industry, including Warner Bros Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.

The trial follows a police raid of May 31, 2006 in Sweden during which servers and computer equipment were seized and the site was temporarily shut down.

Based in Malmö, Pirate Bay, is a search engine for over a million torrents, small files that act as pointers allowing people to download music and films. It boasts a record 22 million users. So far, Pirate Bay has been untouchable, using the argument that the site is legal under Swedish law because it does not host creative material. It has denied making any profit, saying that the money raised through advertising has gone towards upkeep of the website.

Those arguments have been contradicted by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), representing media and film companies for whom Pirate Bay promotes copyright infringement and has made substantial revenues from their activities.

Pirate Bay has many supporters around the world and has even created a political party in Sweden, Piratbyrån (The Pirate Office), which claims to defend the freedom to share culture and knowledge for free. Dozens of Pirate Bay supporters were outside the Stockholm court yesterday, waving black pirate flags.