Sweden formally charges Pirate Bay owners

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

January 31, 2008, 12:18 PM

As expected, the Swedish government charged the owners of Pirate Bay with copyright infringement of four applications, nine movies, and 22 music tracks.

Each of the four owners, Fredrik Neij aka 'TiAMO,' Gottfrid Svartholm Warg aka 'Anakata,' Peter Sunde aka 'Brokep' and businessman Carl Lundström could be liable for fines of up to $188,000 and a two-year jail sentence.

"The Pirate Bay operation has caused massive financial damage to rightsholders," IFPI Swedish chair Ludvig Werner said in a statement. "The profiteers behind The Pirate Bay have no interest in free speech, and they are not running The Pirate Bay because they love music and films. They are totally mercenary and are driven by the desire for personal wealth."

Prosecutor Hakan Roswall said that since The Pirate Bay makes much of its money off of advertising revenues, it could be argued that the group is using the availability of copyrighted material on its service to make a profit.

He further added that the site could be making as much as $4 million annually off these ad revenues.

The Pirate Bay was first targeted in May 2006, when Swedish authorities raided the Pirate Bay and confiscated 180 servers. In December, the investigation ended with over 4,000 pages of paperwork filed according to TorrentFreak.

With the charges filed, the onus now falls on the content owners, who will have until the end of next month to file damage claims. As always, the owners of the Pirate Bay remain defiant.

Servers for the Pirate Bay are no longer hosted in Sweden. The owners made a conscious decision to move the servers outside of the country following the 2006 raid, and on top of that also decided to allow them to be moved to locations unbeknownst to the owners.

With a decentralized system now in place, it is likely going to be much harder to shut the service down, something Prosecutor Roswall noted in earlier comments. He said it would likely take a multi-national effort to stop the site once and for all.

That could be beginning right now: In Denmark, a court has already ordered major ISPs to block access to the site to users in the country. No doubt in the coming weeks, the IFPI, MPAA, and others will be looking to other countries to hand down similar rulings.