Pirate Bay defendants found guilty

From CNET News.com: A Swedish court on Friday found the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty, sentencing each to a year in jail. The defendants were also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants.

The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.

"The crime has been commited in a commercial and organized form," Judge Tomas Norström said in a Web broadcast from a press conference in Stockholm.

Warg and Neij are the founders of The Pirate Bay. Sunde is a programmer and a spokesman there, and Lundström offered technical services to the site in 2005.

The Web site--one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world--offers a search engine for torrents that can be used for file sharing. It also offers a tracker, which is a server that keeps file swappers linked.

After a 13-day trial, judge Tomas Norström, plus his assistant and three namndeman (essentially a jury with extended powers), found ample evidence for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are stored on the Web site.

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