Pirate Bay founders defy year's jail sentence and order to pay £2.5 million

Four men behind the popular file-sharing website The Pirate Bay remained defiant today despite being sentenced to a year in jail each and ordered to pay £2.5 million in damages for helping internet users to download protected music, films and computer games.

In a major victory for Hollywood and the music industry, Fredrik Neij, 30, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 24, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, 30, and Carl Lundström, 49, were found guilty of breaching copyright law in Sweden, where the site was founded.

Among the corporations awarded damages were 21st Century Fox (£900,000), MGM and Columbia Pictures (£500,000 each). The awards fell far short of the £9.5 million in compensation sought by prosecutors.

The four announced that they would appeal and that The Pirate Bay would continue as usual to deal with its estimated 25 million users around the world. They will avoid jail and the fines as long as the legal process continues.

John Kennedy, the head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, called the verdict good news for anyone “who is making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will be protected by law”.

When he testified in the trial on behalf of international music companies, Mr Kennedy said that illegal file-sharing had cost the recording industry billions of dollars in lost revenue.

But in a posting on Twitter, Mr Sunde said: “Nothing will happen to TPB (The Pirate Bay), this is just theatre for the media. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.” He said that he “got the news last night that we lost”.

He confirmed that there would be an appeal against the sentence. “You can view this as a TV series. This is the last episode in the first season with a cliff-hanger. This will be continued. We are the heroes,” he said.

“We cannot nor will not pay [the damages]. Even if I had the money I would have burned it rather than paying.”

Per E Samuelsson, Mr Lundstrom’s lawyer, said: “This is a justice scandal of the biggest kind. The prosecutor leads with one to nil. We will of course appeal.”

Another lawyer, acting for Mr Neij, indicated that there could be a lengthy fight in the upper courts. “I expected them to be acquitted; 30 million Swedish Krona is a gigantic amount. This is a case for the Supreme Court and I will take this case there,” said Jonas Nilsson.

Using a search engine and an internet protocol called BitTorrent, which enables the transfer of large files, The Pirate Bay contains information needed to download film or music files from others who have often copied them without permission.

The Pirate Bay has become public enemy number one for the music and film industries as concern has grown over the level of illegal file sharing.

The defendants have run the site since 2004, after it was set up a year earlier by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyrån.

The website lists hundreds of thousands of “torrent” files, which link the user to content including big Hollywood films, music tracks from every leading star and software from leading companies. The site is free to use and is supported by advertising. According to information provided by The Pirate Bay, in one 24-hour period earlier this year there were 3.3 million unique users in China,1.6 million users in the US and 824,000 users in Britain.

Defenders of the four say that no copyright material is stored on The Pirate Bay’s servers and no swapping of files takes place there. The site’s legal adviser, Mikael Viborg, has stated that because “torrent” files and trackers merely point to content, the site’s activities are legal under Swedish law.

The music and film industries disagreed and will now hope that the case deters illegal file-sharing.

But the founders insist that the site will survive whatever the outcome of the trial. They say they have set up servers in different parts of the world and that they do not know exactly where they are.

A poll of 60,000 Swedes showed that 89 per cent believed that the defendants should have been acquitted.

Analysis: why the Pirate Bay prosecution is no deterrent

There seems little chance that the verdict will change anything in the long war between copyright owners and internet users

Jail sentence for Pirate Bay owners

For most people who use file sharing systems like BitTorrent, it's a normal everyday activity. Want to watch a DVD? Type the name of the film into Pirate Bay, click a link and a few hours later the video is waiting for you on your hard drive. It's simple and easy and much nicer than going out in the rain to a video shop. There's no risk, no mystery, no danger. It doesn't happen in a dark alleyway. If you're looking for outlaw thrills, stick to small-time shoplifting or library book fraud.

For these people, the news that the people behind Pirate Bay have been sentenced to prison for a year is simply baffling. It's a small breakdown in reality, like getting a gas bill with a dozen extra noughts on the end. Because it doesn't seem real, it cannot act as a deterrent. Fear of prosecution for an average file sharer is no greater than fear of an asteroid strike.

In the copyright war between Hollywood studios and internet file-sharers, there is no common language or understanding. Aside from Pirate Bay's posturing, most file sharers don't feel like outlaws. They're not copying films or albums or TV shows because they want to be criminal, but because it's often the easiest way to get these things online. The greatest threat to online piracy in the last decade hasn't been legal action or public education campaigns. It was the success of iTunes, because it presented a practical, well-designed alternative to Napster or BitTorrent. Still, if you download an album using BitTorrent, you can do what you like with it. The same album bought from iTunes comes with a complicated set of regulations about how it can be played and copied.

The moral case behind anti-piracy measures is unanswerable: creative people, and the industries that surround them, should be rewarded. When a DVD or album is illegally downloaded, it's sucking money out of that reward pot. It's not really going anywhere else. While a big site like Pirate Bay makes some profit from advertising, their profits are tiny compared with the lost earnings of the studios.

But there seems little chance that the Pirate Bay verdict will change that. The site is still running on servers around the world, with 20 million active users. It's never been the biggest or most widely used BitTorrent site, it's just the most loud-mouthed. If the music and film industries are planning to fight the file sharers through the courts, this will be a long, long war.