Pirate Bay Founders Jailed
The BBC is reporting that the founders of the now infamous website the Pirate Bay (which we will not link here) have been sentenced to jail.
The founders for a long time had skirted charges based on a loophole in Sweedish law which allowed bit torrent trackers to operate legally in their country. Alexa rates the Pirate Bay 105th most popular of all the websites in the world.
They were sentenced to one year of jail time plus a fine of $4.5 million. The founders say they don’t have it to pay and would rather burn everything they own than pay it.
“Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström,” wrote Wired.com
Engadget, the mega tech blog points out that an appeal is inevitable and that nothing in the courts order will actually shut down the website.
Even if it did if the history of piracy has taught us anything shutting down one venue has been a game of whack a mole. As soon as one ‘mole’ is whacked another pops up to take its place.
2 Responses to 'Pirate Bay Founders Jailed'
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Why waste your time trying to close down all the peer-2-peer sites. Like your article said. As soon as 1 is shut down, 5 more takes it place. As long as the internet is the internet and free to the free world, you won’t be able to shut down these sites. Its like trying to stop drugs. A losing battle. You win some and you lose the same amount. As long as there is a need for something, there will be a supplier. Look at prostitution for example. Been around since the beginning of time.
Oscar
17 Apr 09 at 9:58 pm
See if you can find the video they released on their website in response. It’s not over. There’s still 2 more levels of courts to go through, and the first one where they were found guilty was a court decided by a single person with no jury. The laws haven’t changed since the last time people starting coming after them in force. They’ll be fine because they are just as guilty as Google when it comes to actually hosting torrents. They are a search engine, not a host.
Jim Fitz
20 Apr 09 at 2:23 pm