The men behind of the notorious BitTorrent tracking service known for pointing the way to pirated software, games, music and movies are accused of contributory copyright infringement and face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000.
The defendants are Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrm. Prosecutor Hakan Roswall has summarized the charges as “promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws."
The trial is expected to be closely followed by law enforcement agencies, internet surfers, Hollywood and others. Among other things, it represents the first prosecution of its kind in Sweden, a country once thought of as a bastion of the liberal laws that gave rise to The Pirate Bay five years ago.
“The operators of The Pirate Bay have exploited the creative efforts of others for years by enabling the illegal distribution of audio-visual and other creative works on a vast scale while making a profit for themselves," the Motion Picture Association said in a statement. The association, the international counterpart to the Motion Picture Association of America, added: “It is important that the people responsible for operating The Pirate Bay are dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement authorities in Sweden."
In the United States, eight torrent-tracker administrators and content pirates have pleaded guilty to or have been convicted in an investigation that began in 2005 dubbed Operation D-Elite. But such prosecutions are rare, and usually focus on defendants who specialize in pre-released material. The majority of copyright enforcement in the United States is handled in civil lawsuits brought by copyright owners, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.
Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the anti-copyright Pirate Party, told The Local, an English-language Swedish news site, that The Pirate Bay “scares" the establishment.
“They are fighting tooth-and-nail to bring back the good old days, where there was a hard division into approved senders and passive consumer receivers, where the approved senders would compete for the wallet of the consumers. Essentially, they are trying to turn the internet into a cable TV network," he said.
The Pirate Bay does not directly host copyrighted content. Instead, like other trackers, it hosts torrent files that point to where chunks of the music, movies or software lives on uploaders' computers. The torrent files, in essence, act as a locator allowing The Pirate Bay's more than 22 million users to find the content they're after.
“That means no copyrighted and or illegal materials are stored by us," The Pirate Bay administrators have argued on their website. “It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker."
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