[Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay P2P Trial Begins in Sweden

[Richard Forno]

Pirate Bay P2P Trial Begins in Sweden
Author: Wesley Roberts Category: Tech 6 hours ago

http://techfragments.com/news/446/Tech/Pirate_Bay_P2P_Trial_Begins_in_Sweden.html

The Pirate Bay's copyright infringement trial is now under way in  
Sweden, becoming one of the most watched P2P trials. The site is  
accused of helping users illegally downloaded movies, music, computer  
games, and more from its web site. If the site owners are convicted,  
they could spend two years in prison and a fine around $150,000. In  
addition, many of the leading companies in the motion picture  
industries are wanting an additional $14.3 million.

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest source for BitTorrent trackers,  
while they do not host illegal content they do provide a means of  
finding such content. In May 2006 the company was raided by Swedish  
police who seized their servers and in January of last year the owners  
were charged with the copyright infringement.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) which is  
representing the case of music and film producers, made a statement  
about the case on Friday. Stating, For people who make a living out of  
creativity or in a creative business, there is scarcely anything more  
important than to have your rights protected by the law. Copyright  
exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world from the artist  
to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV  
programme maker - can choose how their creations are distributed and  
get fairly rewarded for their work. The operators of The Pirate Bay  
have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show,  
they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves. That kind of  
abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that  
is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of  
the creative community.

The criminal prosecution of The Pirate Bay is about protecting  
creators from those who violate their rights and deprive them of their  
deserved rewards. The Pirate Bay has hurt creators of many different  
kinds of works, from music to film, from books to TV programmes. It  
has been particularly harmful in distributing copyrighted works prior  
to their official release. This damages sales of music at the most  
important time of their lifecycle." said John Kennedy the CEO and  
Chairman of IFPI. The evidence in this case will show that The Pirate  
Bay is a commercial business which made substantial amounts of money  
for its operators, despite their claim to be only interested in  
spreading culture for free."

The Pirate Bay is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata),  
Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Peter Sunde (brokep). On 15 November 2008,  
The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique  
peers. The Pirate Bay has about 3,400,000 registered users so far.   
It's the world's largest BitTorrent tracker and is ranked as the 109th  
most popular website by Alexa Internet.