Pirate Bay’s Defiant Leadership Slapped with Conspiracy Charges

Site’s admins denounce accusations as idiotic

Making good on a promise tendered last week, the country of Sweden pressed charges against four ThePirateBay.org administrators, accusing them of conspiring to break Swedish copyright law.

According to prosecutor Håkan Roswall, the BitTorrent supersite commercially exploits copyright-protected works through ad revenues, of which it nets over $3 million annually. The four men charged include The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter “Brokep” Sunde, administrators Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, and businessman/entrepreneur Carl Lundström, whose company once provided hosting for the site. Authorities specifically named 33 different copyrighted works, comprising of 20 songs, nine films and four computer games for which The Pirate Bay made torrents available illegally.

Roswall says that the four should be made to pay at least $188,000, which the indictment says is the minimum profit that The Pirate Bay made from its activities. If convicted, they could face up to two years in prison.

IFPI chairman John Kennedy says The Pirate Bay is primarily interested in “making money, not music” and that the site turned Sweden, which is “normally the most law abiding of EU countries,” into a copyright charlatan, with “intellectual property laws on par with Russia.”

Despite the accusations, The Pirate Bay seems unfazed. “In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We've been here for years and we will be here many more,” writes an unnamed administrator on the site’s official blog, before pointing out that Swedish police could have “saved a hell of a lot of trees” by posting the 4,620 pages of legal documents against Sunde and friends – available for approximately $1000 USD – in a PDF torrent on the site.

The Pirate Bay says that it hosts close to a million torrents, which point to files on users’ computers that are distributed across the BitTorrent network. The site maintains that it does not host nor trade in infringing material, an accusation that Sunde dismissed as “idiotic” in an interview with Reuters conducted earlier last January.

BBC’s dot.life blogger Darren Waters believes The Pirate Bay – as opposed to other torrent supersites – was targeted because of its openly defiant attitude and historic resilience to legal threats; the site keeps an online graveyard of sorts littered with takedown notices and administrators’ sarcastic responses. The Pirate Bay’s adversaries include almost every major copyright organization on the planet, as well as numerous artists, software developers, and filmmakers.

Thus far – with one exception, due to a police raid in May 2006 that knocked the site offline for a few days – The Pirate Bay continues to operate unrestricted.