Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundstrm, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.
In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.
Sunde, The Pirate Bay's spokesman, announced the news over Twitter Friday morning before the verdict was official. He remained defiant, and offered comfort to supporters. “Stay calm Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media." The content industry, however, applauded the verdicts.
The two-week trial, which ended March 2, was a joint civil and criminal proceeding that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants, who each faced up to two years in prison. In addition, motion picture and record companies sought $13 million in damages for the 33 movies and music tracks at issue.
The verdicts are a significant symbolic victory for Hollywood, the record labels and the rest of the content industry that claims online piracy costs them billions of dollars in lost sales.
“The Pirate Bay has claimed all the time that their activities are legal," Henrik Pontn, a lawyer who represented the film and computer game companies in the trial, told the Swedish media. “Now that it has been proven illegal we presume that they will stop."
The Pirate Bay crew, though, has vowed to continue running the site whatever happens, and claims that it is secured from a forced shutdown through a network of distributed servers located outside Sweden.
For now, the attention brought by the highly-publicized trial has only made The Pirate Bay more popular. The site has swelled to 22 million users. And thousands of Pirate Bay fans have flocked to sign up for its new $6 anonymization VPN service, which allows torrent feeders and seeders to conduct their business in private without leaving a trace of their internet IP addresses.
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