[LINK] Pirate Bay Guilty

[Frank O'Connor]

News just in ...

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Of course, there will be appeals.

				Regards,
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Pirate Bay defendants found guilty
by Mats Lewanand Erik Palm
http://news.cnet.com/digital-media/?tag=rb_content;overviewHead


A Swedish court on Friday found the four 
defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case 
guilty, sentencing each to a year in jail. The 
defendants were also ordered to pay a total of 30 
million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages 
to copyright holders, among them a number of 
American media giants.

The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm 
Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were 
found guilty of having made 33 
copyright-protected files accessible for illegal 
file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.

"The crime has been commited in a commercial and 
organized form," Judge Tomas Norström said in a 
Web broadcast from a press conference in 
Stockholm.

Warg and Neij are the founders of The Pirate Bay. 
Sunde is a programmer and a spokesman there, and 
Lundström offered technical services to the site 
in 2005.

The Web site--one of the most visited BitTorrent 
destinations in the world--offers a search engine 
for torrents that can be used for file sharing. 
It also offers a tracker, which is a server that 
keeps file swappers linked.

After a 13-day trial, judge Tomas Norström, plus 
his assistant and three namndeman (essentially a 
jury with extended powers), found ample evidence 
for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are 
stored on the Web site.

As a result of a civil claim filed alongside the 
criminal case, the four men will have to pay $3.6 
million in compensation for lost sales to 17 
media companies. Among them are Warner Bros. 
Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures 
Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, 
Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra 
Entertainment, and Activision.

The largest portion of that total is allotted to 
Twentieth Century Fox ($1.3 million), followed by 
Columbia Pictures ($504,000) and Warner Bros. 
($300,000).

The four defendants have already vowed to appeal 
the verdict, and it could take years before the 
case reaches Sweden's Supreme Court.

"This is a victory for the prosecutor so far, but 
this is just the first round," said Jonas 
Nilsson, the defense attorney for Fredrik Neij, 
according to Swedish News Agency TT. The $3.6 
million in damages is extreme in a Swedish case, 
Nilsson told TT.

Update 3:40 a.m. PDT: Added comment from the 
judge and a defense attorney, plus a breakdown of 
the largest portions of the $3.6 million in 
damages.