Its sheer success has made it a particular thorn in the side of the music, TV and film industries, which have seen this case as an important step in stamping out the illegal sharing of copyrighted media.īut if there are other ways of finding these files, what difference does this case make? There are plenty of other such sites on the internet, but not all of them are as popular as The Pirate Bay, which has an estimated 22 million users. These are small files which allow users or 'peers' to download the pirated material directly from other users or 'seeders'. It is basically a search engine for BitTorrent files, commonly known as torrents. The more people sharing the file at any given time, the easier and quicker it is to obtain.Ī popular programme can take between five and seven hours to download, while a film can take twice as long and a more obscure programme up to a whole day.īut for broadband internet users, this is no deterrent: it costs nothing more to stay online for 10 hours than five minutes, so many BitTorrent users leave their computers on overnight or all day. The key is that as soon as you have downloaded even a small fraction of an album or a TV programme, someone else can download it from you, without waiting until the file is complete.

It's all possible thanks to a piece of software called BitTorrent, which allows a number of people to download the same programme at the same time. The site itself does not actually contain the copyrighted material, but provides links so that it can be found elsewhere. The site is essentially a forum for people to post music, movies, computer games and other forms of electronic media so that other people can download them without having to buy their own copies - or to pay the copyright holders for them. It was set up in 2003 by an anti-copyright organisation, Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals. It is described is the world's most high profile file-sharing website.

We look at the case and its implications for consumers and producers of entertainment. They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor (£2.4m) in damages. Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde, speaking on his website: 'We cannot and wouldn't pay'įour men behind the Swedish-based file-sharing website The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright law.įrederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were each sentenced to a year in jail.

The pirate bay trial legal case