The Pirate Bay takes shot to bow but keeps afloat

Although they took a blast of legal cannon fire, the founders of The Pirate Bay are not willing to make their free, file sharing website walk the plank just yet. The site continues to operate and allow people to share files via torrents – including copyrighted material such as music and videos. The four founders were sentenced by a Swedish court to one-year prison terms and ordered to pay compensation and damages of 30-million kronor ($3.6 million US), according to an April 17 Bloomberg News story. What effect will this have on file sharing?

"It takes out the No.1 source of global illegitimate file sharing," said Richard Pfohl, general counsel for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, in an April 22 Canwest News Service story. "Obviously some of that traffic will migrate to other sites, but I think other sites' (operators) will start to think twice when they think they will be held criminally liable."

However, The Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstroem are not willing to give up. They are appealing their sentence. They allege the judge in the case was biased: Tomas Nordström belonged to the Swedish Copyright Association and would therefore have a conflict of interest, according to a May 20 Ars Technica website article.

The Pirate Bay has also taken their fight to the people. In an effect to wound the law firm representing the recording industry, they have setup a website and asked its supporters to send no more than one Swedish kronor at a time to the firm. The idea is to force the lawyers to spend thousands in processing fees, according to a May 13 Guardian newspaper website story.

In an interesting move, the victors in the original case are also appealing. The entertainment companies - including Sony, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros and EMI – feel that the amount The Pirate Bay has been asked to pay in compensation is too low. They claim the amount should be closer to 100 million kronor (about $13 million US), according to Ars Technica.

It seems that The Pirate Bay founders could have to prepare for another court battle – one outside of their native Sweden. A May 3 CNET News website article stated Italy is considering initiating its own proceedings against the website.

The Pirate Bay is reported to be the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world. According to the Canwest News Service article, The Pirate Bay said in February it had 22 million simultaneous users and reports have indicated it handles half of all BitTorrent traffic online.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. It starts with a "seed." The users downloading the files are called peers. Once they have downloaded the files, many peers become seeds. The torrent itself does not contain the file but rather lists the addresses where parts of the larger file are located. Various BitTorrent software programs automate much of the process. By breaking the files into smaller parts the bandwidth is spread out over several computers and there is not a load on just one server. The Pirate Bay tracks torrents and allows people to search for them.

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