Pirate Bay Men Found Guilty - Users Setup Shop Elsewhere

The four ring leaders of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of being assessors to copyright infringement by the Stockholm district court. The four, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstrm, were given one year in prison and were ordered to pay $3.5 million in damages.

The court said by providing a website with the means to search for copyrighted material and the four allowing such material to be searched for, was the courts strongest evidence. They received the one year jail time because the four conducted the operation in a business mindset to make a profit.

The Pirate Bay was a website that provided indexes and torrent files which primarily provided anyone with searchable access to anything from MP3's to movies still in theaters. The site was established in November of 2003 as an anti-copyright organization and was later split into separate organizations in October 2004. On 15 November 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique peers. The Pirate Bay has about 3,500,000 registered users.

Today, the site is unreachable and users have already been setting up shop at other popular torrent tracker sites.