The Pirate Bay: Guilty as charged

In one of the biggest technology-oriented legal cases of the year (the entire trial was broadcast live on Swedish TV), the four men responsible for the operation of the notorious Pirate Bay website -- an unapologetic haven for obtaining copyrighted music, TV shows, movies, software, and just about anything else for free -- have at last been found guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available." All four defendants have been sentenced to one year in prison and are compelled to pay damages of $905,000 each.

The verdict is paradoxically both surprising and wholly expected. On the surface, it's obvious that The Pirate Bay has always done what it was charged with, "assisting in making copyright content available" is the site's very charter, and the website has long been upfront that that's exactly what it does. But TPB has always offered up the defense that, under Swedish law, making copyrighted material available for download is not actually illegal. Some of its letters to Hollywood studios in response to demands that it take down copies of various movies linked on the site are downright hysterical in their brashness.

The Pirate Bay's major point of defense (popularly dubbed the "King Kong" defense) makes some good points: The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent tracker site, and it doesn't actually store any of the content in question on its servers but rather (putting it in simple terms for the sake of this post) merely links to places where the content can be found. The Pirate Bay may be instrumental in the management of these illegal downloads, but it doesn't keep copies of the files in question. That's significant, but the court ultimately decided, as other courts have with similar P2P networks in the past, that it didn't matter: Facilitating the transaction was reason enough for the verdict.

Of course, since this trial is occurring on Swedish soil and involves Swedish defendants and Swedish law, it's not as earth-shaking and precedent-setting for U.S. Internet users as, say, the Napster trial was at the beginning of the decade. However, it does set a bit of a chilly stage for the future of file sharing, as at least a few other P2P sites are likely to shut down in the wake of this verdict if for no other reason than they simply want to avoid a prison term. (A fine is one thing, going to jail is something else.) That said, it's almost certain that other networks will rush to fill the void left by the potential absence of The Pirate Bay, though I should note, the site is still up and running and seems likely to continue to do so for the immediate future.

Meanwhile, the pirates of The Pirate Bay seem unfazed by the verdict and say they will appeal -- a process which some say could take as long as six years to run its course.