Music industry welcomes Pirate Bay website conviction
The UK music industry today welcomed the conviction in Sweden of four men connected to a major internet file-sharing site.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom were each sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay £2.7 million in damages to a number of entertainment companies including Sony, EMI and Warner Brothers.
The Pirate Bay website provides a forum for tens of millions of people to share and freely download music, films and computer software.aring.
Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the BPI, the body which represents the recording industry in the UK, said the court's decision was a victory for British artists.
"This may be the verdict of a Swedish court, but it is a great outcome for British music," he said.
"Criminal sites like Pirate Bay seriously undermine investment in music and in legal online services and do nothing to reward artists or creators.
"We hope that this decision will encourage British music fans to steer clear of these parasitic illegal download services and support the future of British music by downloading legally."
The Pirate Bay verdict comes as leading figures from the entertainment and communications industries gather in London for a summit on the future of the UK's digital economy.
The Government's interim Digital Britain report in January suggested setting up a digital rights agency to work with entertainment companies, internet service providers and consumers to tackle the growing problem of online piracy and illegal file-sharing.
PA
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Ben Hurst
Who cares about the court's decision, filesharing never gonna die in Sweden. We just want the old fart industri to make leagal sites to dl movies and music. Get a grip and smell the new order in Sweden.
What's cheaper than free? Jail. When a Freetard produces something of worth I'll listen to their arguments.
I find it amazing that the music industry is so powerful and deceitful.
I'm a professional photographer and had the misfortune of having 40 of my photos illegally published in high resolution on a foreign 'fan site'. The fan site had put their logo over my images, passing them off as their own, with absolutely no credit or copyright information displayed, let alone license fee paid.
The record label who look after this artist the posted links all over her official websites, facebook, myspace, and their own corporate site, inviting people to check out the photos and let them know what they think.
This is exactly the same crime that they are suing pirate bay for... not for hosting copyright infringing material, but linking to it.
They also sued an Australian man for providing HYPERLINKS to copyright MP3 files, even though he was not in possession of them, or hosting them himself.
Strange then that the record label, when presented with an invoice for the license fee of the images turned around and said they had not used the images (which clearly they had, as they were using them to promote their artist AND elicit feedback from the fans) and they had therefore not breached my copyright, and wouldn't pay.
Do you think I could find a law firm willing to fight my case against them?
It's funny when the shoe is on the other foot, linking to copyright infringing material isn't a crime after all... Perhaps photos aren't regarded as worthy as an MP3 file?