Media News - Friday, February 03, 2012

Swedish court denies final appeal to Pirate Bay founders

Sweden's Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday not to hear the appeal of four founders of controversial The Pirate Bay website, the world's largest clearinghouse of peer-to-peer BitTorrent filesharing. Carl Lundstom, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde were denied appeal. Together with fellow founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who was ill and did not attend the appeal, the four men now face prison sentences of between 4 and 10 months and a combined fine of SEK 46m (USD 6.8m). All four have since moved abroad, and it is unclear when and how they will need to pay up and sit down in jail. "We are already seeing some implications of the decision," Marten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University, said in an e-mail to Deutsche Welle. "Representatives of the rights holders have issued public statements that they will take this decision as a starting point for a crackdown on filesharers and especially on services that facilitate (illegal) filesharing by others." Sweden's Anti-Piracy Bureau told Stockholm's local newspaper Aftonbladet that it was preparing a new offensive against filesharers. Meanwhile, the filesharing website has taken down its main site and is now redirecting traffic to a Swedish mirror to thepiratebay.se. The action appears to be a defensive move to avoid domain seizure by US authorities. (Deutsche Welle)

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