Intellectual Property Law

Conviction in The Pirate Bay Case

By dkoonce

Today in Stockholm the Swedish District Court handed down a  $3.5 Million fine and one year in jail time for the people behind The Pirate Bay, a popular bittorrent tracker.  While the people fined say they would rather burn down their homes than pay the fine, (Ars interview), it appears they will have to serve the imprisonment.  The IFPI, a European version of the RIAA in the United States, prosecuted for the copyright holders in the case.  Sweden typically has a more lax attitude towards copyright infringement, which is one of many reasons The Pirate Bay hosted there.  In Sweden, a law recently went into effect mandating the disclosure of private data by ISP’s of file-sharers.   The trial has major implications for all of the European countries implementing the IPRED, as well as bolstering the position of copyright enforcers in the United States as well. The Pirate Bay website is currently still functioning and hosting torrent files. 

Full post as published by BC Law Intell. Prop. & Tech. Forum on April 17, 2009 (boomark / email).