Pirate Bay P2P Trial Begins in Sweden

The Pirate Bay's copyright infringement trial is now under way in Sweden, becoming one of the most watched P2P trials. The site is accused of helping users illegally downloaded movies, music, computer games, and more from its web site. If the site owners are convicted, they could spend two years in prison and a fine around $150,000. In addition, many of the leading companies in the motion picture industries are wanting an additional $14.3 million.

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest source for BitTorrent trackers, while they do not host illegal content they do provide a means of finding such content. In May 2006 the company was raided by Swedish police who seized their servers and in January of last year the owners were charged with the copyright infringement.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) which is representing the case of music and film producers, made a statement about the case on Friday. Stating, For people who make a living out of creativity or in a creative business, there is scarcely anything more important than to have your rights protected by the law. Copyright exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world from the artist to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV programme maker - can choose how their creations are distributed and get fairly rewarded for their work. The operators of The Pirate Bay have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show, they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves. That kind of abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of the creative community.

The criminal prosecution of The Pirate Bay is about protecting creators from those who violate their rights and deprive them of their deserved rewards. The Pirate Bay has hurt creators of many different kinds of works, from music to film, from books to TV programmes. It has been particularly harmful in distributing copyrighted works prior to their official release. This damages sales of music at the most important time of their lifecycle." said John Kennedy the CEO and Chairman of IFPI. The evidence in this case will show that The Pirate Bay is a commercial business which made substantial amounts of money for its operators, despite their claim to be only interested in spreading culture for free."

The Pirate Bay is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Peter Sunde (brokep). On 15 November 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique peers. The Pirate Bay has about 3,400,000 registered users so far. It's the world's largest BitTorrent tracker and is ranked as the 109th most popular website by Alexa Internet.