AVN Online News: Pirate Bay Managers Indicted in Copyright-Infringement Case
 

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Four men identified as managers of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, which provides a search engine for BitTorrent files, were indicted Thursday on charges of copyright infringement.
Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström were indicted for running The Pirate Bay.

According to charges filed by senior public prosecutor Håkan Roswall, the site "promotes other people's infringements and breaching of copyright laws."

FULL STORY

The charge sheet consists of 33 cases involving alleged copyright infringement. Twenty of the cases involve music, nine involve movies, and four involve computer games.

Roswall pointed out dozens of works that had been illegally downloaded through The Pirate Bay, including The Beatles' "Let It Be," Robbie Williams' "Intensive Care" and the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

interesting!

thread of the day!!! :321GFY to all the poachers

Nothing will happen, Sweden rules.

You piss in giants eyes long enough and laugh. They will eventually figure a way to piss back.

Agreed. :thumbsup

Yay!!!!!

33 cases? that must be a joke. how about 33 million cases?

Hopefully one will stick

I've been saying this for yrs... sooner or later it comes back :2 cents:

whats the penalty if convicted?

None will stick? And the prosecutor in this case knows this. They are charged with abetment to a crime and it will not stand without evidence of a crime. This Sweden, not USA.

what does that mean? your own prosecutors are incompetent and do not know Swedish law?

Yup, but they probably just picked the ones most likely leading to a conviction...and just one case would ruin them for life anyway. I doubt they magically dodge the bullets, about time.

sounds like thats exactly what he is saying.

They do know Swedish law. This trial will only serve as precedence which is needed right now.

at least they have the idea

I am not sure how much you know about EU laws but the European Court of Justice has recently passed some directives witch basically say it is up to every members state to define what is legal and what is not in regards to file sharing. This trial against PB will serve as precedence and decision to go on with it is political.

They have NOT committed the actual crime. They are only charged with abetment to a crime. I have a law degree and I have never heard of anyone getting convicted as an ?accomplice? if nobody is convicted for the main crime.
By the way I am not making this up :) These words are the prosecutor?s words.

33 x maximum fine per infringment of $150,000.00 equals almost 5 million $
Not a bad pay day ?



.

150k per infringment in Sweden? hehehehe

This is NOT USA

you have a law degree and you don't understand that abetting means being an accomplice to the commission of a crime? are you trying to tell me i can help you kill someone and bury the body and i'm ok in Sweden... as long as i let you do the shooting?... and if they never catch you, i never have to worry about prosecution?

I know very well what abetting means.

If there is no evidence of a crime there is no prosecution. In this case prosecutor (and the court) has to guess if the crime has been committed.

the charges are based on evidence gathered from their seized hardware in 2006. why would you argue that they are simply "guessing" that a crime was committed and can't substantiate it?

thats also quite illogical. have you read the 33 counts?

"In 2007, some 600,000 out of nine million Swedes downloaded feature films, according to Mediavision. The Swedish research firm expects the number to rise to some 800,000 this year."

doesn't seem to me like its hard to connect the dots between piratebay.org and Swedes downloading copyrighted material given all the hardware, e-mails, icq logs, public comments, interviews, blog posts on their sites etc

it seems obvious who is making access to that material available (contributory infringement etc) and that they do it to profit from it

and it seems quite clear that the very purpose of the site and the often stated intent of its owners is to do that exact thing.



(btw... Sweden remains one of my favorite countries.. been there many many times.)

Time to abandon ship.

They have never uploaded or downloaded anything themselves. Uploading and downloading of copyrighted material is the crime that is committed by a third person. Whether this actually is a crime or not is just a media speculation. There is no investigation into it. That means the court will basically have to guess whether or not any crime has been committed and if PB people are guilty of helping to commit that crime.

But as you say they have been profiting of off this. That is what prosecutor is targeting but there is a problem here too :) They have never sold any ad space themselves. They are using some kind of third party Israeli company (Targetpoint) for selling ads and the prosecutor is having a very hard time connecting them to the money.

lets face it, piratebay is like hans gruber from die hard.

they are exceptional theifs

Looks like they have finally run aground.