They where sentenced as they where found guilty of intent, helping people to break the law. In that case, BMW should also be guilty when they make cars that can go faster then the speed limits. The system must change, this laws wont work in the long run.

Are you forgetting that Pirate Bay is a multi-million dollar operation with offshore accounts and trust funds? Wouldn't that be nice! Whether you agree with piracy or not, what right does a greedy opportunist like this have to profit off backs of another company's labour, especially indie developers making a fraction of their earnings? Our labour...MY labour is lining their pockets and I can tell you it gives you that dirty feeling of being ripped-off. Similar to the feeling you get when you buy a poor quality, incomplete game loaded with DRM. I think you really need to question where the real greed is. Pirate Bay's 'anti-corporate' propaganda plays on a pre-existing contempt for corrupt American giants but it fails to address the fact that the creators of your entertainment suffer the most.

Are you talking about the millions of copyrighted videos that random people put up illegally, or the bunch of crap home videos that people upload?  The first has nothing to do with anything - the movie industry is trying to take down youtube copyright infringers as well.  The second one.... seriously?  Is the mass idiocy of lolcats, fat guys singing, and crappy home-made animations supposed to be the replacement for actual movies by actual directors with actual budgets?   You can have that... I'll keep the actual movie industry any day.

lol this thread is soo funny. 

First off, software "piracy" wont go away.  Remember Napster (as posted some pages back)?  We all thought "oh great, Metalica just killed P2P" but how far from true was that?  You could remove all the torrent sites and more would pop up.  Its only funny because i "pirate" software all the time.  For instance, Demigod, i downloaded that from a torrent site.  Im never paying 50$ for another game again (or whatever the cost) simply because i have bought too many crap games with pretty boxes and great "E3 movies" that dont fit the game at all.  The fix is not "jailing the torrent site admins" it should be stronger data protection.  But then again .... Sony and Disney had awesome protection for thier DVDs.  It was broken rather fast and DVDs were coppied again.  If companies are soooo worried they need to come up with something better then SecureROM or other crappy "hackable" protection.  CDKEYS?  What a joke, start making these keys random not from an easily cracked "system".  You know all this crap (SecureROM Disney Protection, Sony Protection etc) does NOT work with Mac OS?  You can rip a movie or game (insert media type here) with Mac (pretty much any OS other then Craprosofts junk).  Did i mention how Microsoft got started?  Wouldnt that be considered "piracy" now?  Or are we calling that "ok"?  Maybe a bad example.. but i think most of you know what im getting at (maybe yall on momys puter' are clueless right now but hang in there).  The laws need to be changed and the companies need to do more then sit there and cry.  Do they lose out on a ton of money from ppl downloading games and playing them for free?  They sure do.  To say "well they wernt going to buy it so they should get it for free and no one looses a thing" is stupid (posted page 2 i think). 

A lot of ISP companies are going to the "big brother" method.  I know 90% of them are already on it and ppl are getting knocked off for movies all the time.  I happen to be on one of those right now.  They can tell what movie and what torrent.com you used to get it, all the important info.  They also send the information to the "parent movie company" and let them know whats going on.  Again, a simple IP block fixes this issue.  The reall issue is not games... i dont really see game companies loseing THAT much money over torrents.  Think Blizzard is worried about losing 60% of thier income to piratebay ?  haha, they sure arnt.  We trust them, we grew up with them, we know what they can do. 

Torrents/P2P isnt the problem, its companies pushing out crap and making YOU (the consumer) pay for it.  Too many ppl getting burned too many times.  Why pay when i can get it for free and if i want to play multiplayer cause my CDKEY is crap, i can buy it.  Sounds like a winner to me.... or why not encrypt the EXE's to look for the CD?  Why stop there, lets add double, no tripple ... no lets add CD checks all over the place, i mean who cares about a few more KB added to the already 8gig game im installing.  Want an example of burned?  Go pay for Gothic2 .. lol.  Unless you speak german you will get burned.  Want updates?  dont have them.  Want translations?  no go there to.  I bought it at a US store and it was version 1.0 german and crashed like CRAZY.  Its happend mroe then jsut that one time to.  Hell even the F2P games are doing it now to.  Runes of Magic, go check out thier "game movie" then download the game and wonder where all the good stuff went and why the movie has NOTHING to do with the game at all (not 1 thing in the movie is actually in the game).  Companies are lazy.  They only care about the dollar ... or yen... or .. sea shell .. or whatever your money is.

Im not saying lets all go download game/movies..w/e and say "im only one guy, they wont miss 50$" ... these guys jailed (pirate bay) is stupid.  HIGH FIVE to the retards that decided to put them there.  A lot of you have said "everyone should be jailed for coppying stuff"  True, ever quote a movie?  or say "lets get ready to rumble!"  You actually have to pay that guy for saying that.  I should be jailed for typing it since i didnt pay him.  How many of you made "mickey mouse ears" from 3 quaters or dimes or whatever?  I used to when i was little, thats copy protected.  Jail ... All im saying is, used in moderation and for "the right reasons" torrents can be the best thing for companies.  i like the 30 day full trial thing.  I mean i can download an OS and trial a full copy for 30 days without buying it as long as i delete it.  True story.  Hell even cell phone companies give you 14 days without paying lol.  Those 2 didnt desurve what they got, but the law needed to "make a point" and an example of someone and they did just that.

Any paying members of Rapidshare Premium Zone here?

The cohesive global institution (neutral) dream of "United Nations" has yet to be completely independant of Industrial/Financial/Political/..al/..etc interests.

Sure, historically - the Blues stood (and still do) between warrying countries to enforce everlasting Peace and promote Human Rights, somehow.

Utopia is a two (i'd gamble the term - multiple if i only could) edge sword and as of now, we're simply cutting a sharp bloody line to separate poverty from wealth.

The real fight is made of intelligence not beliefs.

(moved to post above. Please let me message me if you know how to delete posts)

I think the Swedes have got it all wrong. If their logic has any sense anyone who sends a textor vedio as attachment to anyone else is also guilty. The whole of the Internet is a free file sharing site.

That's too bad.  Copyright laws are bogus, people need to adapt to new technology, not fight against it.  People like the Pirate Bay founders are just going with a new technological trend, and honestly I think it's a good thing.  It makes music and content far more available to people who would otherwise have no way to get it, and they've also forced the legitimized music industry to lower music costs (see: Zune offering unlimited music downloads for $15 /month). 

Besides the fact that music / dvds have been and largely still are way too expensive for what they are, the vast majority of what has been recorded / created / filmed at any given time is not available to the buying public.  The only way to get it is through p2p downloading.

Also, the supposed evidence for p2p sharing and "pirating" hurting music industry revenues and the like have often been shown to be tenuous at best.  The fact is, the idea that online file sharing is killing certain industries is to a large extent exaggerated.  The legitimate industries need to adapt to their "illegal" competition - it's basic capitalism.  Until they can provide a comparable legal alternative, file sharing will continue to thrive, and rightly so.

They might not go to jail for that long.. they are still appealing it.  Their servers are also being moved to the netherlands, so the server will continue to operate and they did not make millions.. in court it was shown they made about 100,000 dollars or so.  I don't condone piracy as it would put every person working on this for a living out of work (and out of a living) but I do think that piracy has made some software more popular (I can think of Windows 3.1)

I see alot of incredibly stupid comments here, so i figure i need to type down something that actually makes sense. They have only lost the first round in the lowest criminal court, a court that quite often makes rulings that are overturned in the higher ones, due to a variety of reasons.  And they have appealed which means that it will continue to run until the swedish supreme court or even the international human rights court makes a final ruling. (depending how far the two sides wants it to go) The verdict as it stands here and now is not final, thus nobody can say they are guilty as the case has not finished processing yet. Alas the end result may aswell see them innocent as guilty, only time will tell.

From the viewpoint of someone who actually listened to 30+ hours of the trial and has been paying close attention to it aswell as having studied law, i must say that i find it highly ulikely that the ruling will stand. The procecutor and his band of merry hollywood-lawyers-tag along made a total fool of themselves during most of the trial, going from having to drop half of what they had originally charged the piratebay-boys with due to not understanding the technology behind it all, to harassing people testifying in a highly distastefull manner. I personally heard the procecutor Haakon whatever his last name was calling people liars and cowards. In my personal oppinion what happened there was nothing more than a mockery, and its obvious that the judge was biased like hell or he would have made short work of such as went on in there.

If the piratebay is going down for "helping to distribute copyrighted material" then google, msn and hundreds of other serviced also need to go down. First and foremost law need to be consequent, you cant just pick and choose what to pick on. If something is illegal then it is illegal, it has to be illegal all the way. And if offering a service that lets people of their own free wil share material, be it legal or illegal without supervision is illegal then many others need to go. Heck you can without supervision send files to others via the inbuilt program on msn messenger, Sure it goes slower, which means smaller files, but remember: a 40 kb book file of copyrighted material is just as illegal as a 15 gb pc game. The law cannot separate them. Im sure you see the circle here, one cannot attack google, msn and the rest for this, thus the ruling cannot stand as it cannot contine and it needs to do just that. Perfect example of stupid people in action.

Then before someone makes a brainy comment abouth how they are different due to their name/attitude/their public list of correspondance with copyright holders, try to understand that these things dont mean jack shit in a legal sense. And for those interested they actually proved that they operated with the same name years before the start of piratebay for another entirely different project, and as for the attitude: well its not illegal is it? The legal correspondance is also perfectly ok, they stated on their web page that they had no say in what was laid out on the site, if anyone had any complaints they would need to take it up with the guy who had put it there and the ones seeding/downloading it. Still the companies continued to send them mail and call them and that in turn led to the piratebay starting to make fun of those issues.

I can understand that the greedy big companies get annoyed with people who make fun of their important lawyers and then ridicule them publicly and lastly who refuse to budge from their strongarm tactics (go read some of the correspondance if you doubt my word, they say things like that they are going to take their house to that they are going to make all sort of problems for them in the correspondance) but annoying someone is not illegal.

Also the piratebay has not made much cash at all. There was some rediculous amounts beeing circulated both in court and in the media, with amounts beeing made beeing around 4-5 million dollars, when in reality it all amounted to around 220,000 dollar for all the years they have been running it. And running such a place takes a substantial amount of time aswell as expensive stuff so its not like theyve really made any cash at all.

The industry has been labeling every new technology contrary to their interests since the damm paper was first invented as a great evil, maybe its time to think a bit different eh? i understand that they want to be able to contine to milk the cow they have been milking for so very long. But times change and they need to follow or they will be left behind.

To repeat myself somewhat. Lot of stupid posts in this thread. If people cant be bothered to think for a second before opening their big mouth they should maybe keep it shut.

Agreed, a nice retort. However, from what I undersand, the verdict was based solely on the intent of the defendants and nothing to do with the technology or anything else (if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me). I don't know whether that will stand up through an appeal or not, but keep in mind that intent is used in court to differentiate between degrees of murder, so it's not without precedent to sentence based on that.

That being said, I'm also under the impression that their convction was not covered under any existing Swedish law (anyone know if this is the case?). If that's correct, then I can't see how it would stand up through an appeal.