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The founders of The Pirate Bay have been sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay a huge fine to entertainment companies after a Swedish court found them guilty of breaking copyright law. But will the ruling stop illegal filesharing?
Does the court ruling against The Pirate Bay mean that illegal online filesharing has been scuttled? It has certainly fired a powerful warning shot across the bows of those who would follow the site’s lead: The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Carl Lundstrom, have been found guilty of breaking Swedish copyright law and sentenced to a year in jail.

They have also been ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor (£2 million) to several entertainment companies named in the lawsuit, including Sony Music, Warner Bros and EMI, who accused The Pirate Bay of facilitating the illegal sharing of their copyrighted material.

Although The Pirate Bay did not itself host any of these files, it did provide links to other websites and torrent services where music and films could be illegally acquired. Nonetheless, the court ruling has fundamentally asserted the right of media companies to have their creative copyright internationally recognised and upheld, and to exploit this material as they see fit for financial benefit. It has also clearly demonstrated that even those websites which do not host illegal material, but simply point to it, can be held responsible for subsequent copyright infringement.

Telegraph.co.uk