The Pirate Bay founders lost their appeal in the Swedish Appeals Court

This article is also available in:
Deutsch: [The Pirate Bay Gründer verlieren im Berufungsverfahren | http://www.unwatched.org/node/2394]

Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström and Fredrik Neij, who, in April 2009, were found
guilty of copyright infringement through their file-sharing website, The
Pirate Bay (TPB), have recently lost their appeal in Svea Court of Appeal.

Although the court has decided to reduce their imprisonment sentence of one
year to 8, 4 and 10 months respectively, it has however increased their
individual fines from about 3,45 million Euro to about 5 million Euro each.

A separate hearing will take place later for the forth TPB founder, Gottfrid
Svartholm Warg who was ill and could not take part in the proceedings with
the other three men.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, considers the trial was
politically-motivated and believes that: “The copyright laws have strayed so
far from the public’s perception of justice that copyright cannot survive
without drastic reform. In such a reform, there is no place for today’s
copyright industry.”

La Quadrature du Net called the decision “both absurd and unfair. It
illustrates how an obsolete copyright law and its indiscriminate application
are harmful to society as a whole.”

Christian Engstrom, member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party
has told Deutsche Welle that the ruling only proved that the influence
corporations have on the Swedish coursts is too large.. “The lawyers for the
record companies are friends with the judges, both in the lower court and in
the appeals court. They belong to the same societies for copyright, which is
a lobby organization for copyright lawyers. This corruption unfortunately
leads to the fact that you can’t get a fair trial in copyright-related
issues in Sweden today,” he said. He also expressed his concern as to the
damage this kind of ruling might do to the Internet. “It’s potentially very
damaging to the Internet as a whole that the providers of infrastructure
can’t know if they will be held liable for what other people do.”

Obviously, the music industry welcomed the ruling. “Today’s judgement
confirms the illegality of The Pirate Bay and the seriousness of the crimes
of those involved.” was the statement of the International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry’s CEO Fances Moore.

The court had found that TPB “has facilitated illegal file sharing in a way
that results in criminal liability for those who run the service.” However,
Pirate Bay facilitates the exchange of so-called Bit Torrent data but only
provides the links to content that is already available online. “This
decision amounts to condemning a library catalogue instead of the author of
some infringing content or activity” underlined La Quadrature du Net.

The defendants had claimed they could not be liable for the material
exchanged via their site, because the copyrighted material was not stored on
its servers and there was no actual exchange of files. But the prosecution
argued that, through TPB, the four men encouraged the infringement of
copyrights.

Sunde said on Twitter that the case would now go to the Swedish Supreme
Court.

Pirate Bay verdict: Three operators lose appeal- Prison sentences reduced
but fines jacked up (26.11.2010)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/26/pirate_bay_appeal_verdict/

Swedish court turns down Pirate Bay appeal (26.11.2010)
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6271356,00.html

The Pirate Bay Decision, or the Political Persecution of Sharing
(29.11.2010)
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/the-pirate-bay-decision-or-the-political-persecution-of-sharing

Pirate Bay appeal failure spawns more DoS attacks – Revenge of Anonymous
(29.11.2010)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/29/pirate_bay_revenge_ddos/

EDRi-gram: The Pirate Bay founders considered guilty by the first Swedish
court (22.04.2009)
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.8/the-pirate-bay-court-decision