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Deutsch: The Pirate Bay Gründer verlieren im Berufungsverfahren
Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström and Fredrik Neij, who, in April 2009, were found guilty of copyright infringement through their file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), have recently lost their appeal in Svea Court of Appeal.
Although the court has decided to reduce their imprisonment sentence of one year to 8, 4 and 10 months respectively, it has however increased their individual fines from about 3,45 million Euro to about 5 million Euro each.
A separate hearing will take place later for the forth TPB founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg who was ill and could not take part in the proceedings with the other three men.
Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, considers the trial was politically-motivated and believes that: "The copyright laws have strayed so far from the public's perception of justice that copyright cannot survive without drastic reform. In such a reform, there is no place for today's copyright industry."
La Quadrature du Net called the decision "both absurd and unfair. It illustrates how an obsolete copyright law and its indiscriminate application are harmful to society as a whole."
Christian Engstrom, member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party has told Deutsche Welle that the ruling only proved that the influence corporations have on the Swedish coursts is too large.. "The lawyers for the record companies are friends with the judges, both in the lower court and in the appeals court. They belong to the same societies for copyright, which is a lobby organization for copyright lawyers. This corruption unfortunately leads to the fact that you can't get a fair trial in copyright-related issues in Sweden today," he said. He also expressed his concern as to the damage this kind of ruling might do to the Internet. "It's potentially very damaging to the Internet as a whole that the providers of infrastructure can't know if they will be held liable for what other people do."
Obviously, the music industry welcomed the ruling. "Today's judgement confirms the illegality of The Pirate Bay and the seriousness of the crimes of those involved." was the statement of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's CEO Fances Moore.
The court had found that TPB "has facilitated illegal file sharing in a way that results in criminal liability for those who run the service." However, Pirate Bay facilitates the exchange of so-called Bit Torrent data but only provides the links to content that is already available online. "This decision amounts to condemning a library catalogue instead of the author of some infringing content or activity" underlined La Quadrature du Net.
The defendants had claimed they could not be liable for the material exchanged via their site, because the copyrighted material was not stored on its servers and there was no actual exchange of files. But the prosecution argued that, through TPB, the four men encouraged the infringement of copyrights.
Sunde said on Twitter that the case would now go to the Swedish Supreme Court.
Pirate Bay verdict: Three operators lose appeal- Prison sentences reduced
but fines jacked up (26.11.2010)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/26/pirate_bay_appeal_verdict/
Swedish court turns down Pirate Bay appeal (26.11.2010)
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6271356,00.html
The Pirate Bay Decision, or the Political Persecution of Sharing
(29.11.2010)
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/the-pirate-bay-decision-or-the-politica...
Pirate Bay appeal failure spawns more DoS attacks - Revenge of Anonymous
(29.11.2010)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/29/pirate_bay_revenge_ddos/
EDRi-gram: The Pirate Bay founders considered guilty by the first Swedish
court (22.04.2009)
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.8/the-pirate-bay-court-decision