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March 3, 2009

Pirate Bay Owners face prison sentence

Prosecution calls for a one-year jail term

Carrie-Ann Skinner

The four owners of Swedish BiTorrent search engine the Pirate Bay could face up to a year in prison.

Frederik Neij, Carl Lundstom, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Warg are currently on trial charged with facilitating copyright infringement. Swedish authorities are seeking compensation from the four, along with the Motion Picture Association and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Prosecutor Haakan Roswall told the court: "I believe that the correct punishment should be one year in prison and that is what I am requesting that the district court hand down in this case".

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The Pirate Bay never hosted content but instead indexed files available on peer-to-peer filesharing tool BitTorrent. Users searched for the files they wanted through the Pirate Bay and then downloaded them directly from the machines the file were stored on.

Swedish police initially raided the company that hosted The Pirate Bay servers in May 2006, and charges where filed in January 2008.

Just days into the case, the most serious charges were dropped, after lawyers defending the Pirate Bay owners claimed the prosecution did not understand the technology used by the website.

A decision in the case is not expected for a few weeks yet.

See also: Eircom won't block access to The Pirate Bay

Free whitepaper: Phishing for victims - Truth, myth and cybercrime

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