The Pirate Bay trial
Copyright infringement trial of torrent tracker
The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights holders led by the Motion Picture Association and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.
Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, who ran the site; and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, nine to movies, and four to games. One case involving music files was later dropped by the copyright holder who made the file available again on the website of The Pirate Bay. In addition, claims for damages of 117 million kronor (US$13 million) were filed. The case was decided jointly by a professional judge and three appointed lay judges.
The trial started on 16 February 2009 in the Stockholm District Court, Sweden. The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced on Friday 17 April 2009: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were all found guilty and sentenced to one year imprisonment and pay a fine of 30 million SEK (about €2.7 million or US$3.5 million).
“The Pirate Bay trial” enters the record as copyright infringement trial of torrent tracker. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pirate, trial and Copyright can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Pirate Bay trial” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.