Intellectual Property Law

Pirate Bay operators guilty of criminal infringement in Sweden; no webcast of US file sharing case

By McKee, Voorhees & Sease, P.L.C.

In the past day, there has been two interesting bits of news in the world of cases alleging copyright infringement by way of peer-to-peer file sharing.

The first is that the individuals who operate and maintain the servers that host The Pirate Bay, the world's largest bittorrent tracker, were held to have committed criminal copyright infringement by a Swedish court.  The four individuals were each sentenced to a year in prison, and ordered to pay a combined 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in damages, substantially less than the $17.5 million in damages requested by the media companies.  The Pirate Bay has video press conference on its site.  The individuals are calling the verdict a win, vowing to appeal their conviction.  As an author who wrote a book about the Swedish piracy movement stated: 

If they're convicted, they'll be martyrs and the "piracy" movement will continue working for what they believe in, even more strongly. If they win, the signal to the public is that file sharing isn't illegal and The Pirate Bay will basically have achieved its goal.

The issue is far from over, with an appeal of the convictions upcoming, the leader of Sweden's Pirate Party issued a statement to the BBC that the verdict was a "gross injustice," and that:

This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure. There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it.  Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament.

Despite the convictions, The Pirate Bay's website will continue operation, as the servers hosting it have been relocated outside Sweden.

The other development is a decision yesterday by the First Circuit reversing a district court's decision in a U.S. file sharing case.  In that case (In re Sony BMG Music Entertainment), the district court granted the defendant's request that pretrial hearings be made available via webcast over the objections of various recording company plaintiffs.  The First Circuit held this was not permitted based on the policy of the judicial conference of the United States and the district court's local rule 83.3.  All relevant court documents may be found on the Recording Industry vs. the People blog, which is operated by Ray Beckerman, an attorney who has represented file sharing defendants. 

All in all, a busy 24 hours in the world of file sharing cases.

Full post as published by FileWrapper on April 17, 2009 (boomark / email).