The founders of The Pirate Bay again have problems: the Finnish court decided to pay $ 477,000 in favor of the copyright holders

The Three Founders of The Pirate Bay: Fredrik Ney, Gottfried Svartholm and Peter Sunde



The pirate resource The Pirate Bay has been working for many years, despite the attempts of the right holders to limit its work or close it altogether. At the same time, the founders of the “bay” are constantly located between the hammer and the anvil. As soon as one trouble ends, another begins.



This time, Fredrik Ney and Gottfried Svartholm were convicted by the court of violating the rights of several companies-owners of rights. First of all, we are talking about music labels. As punishment, the defendants will have to pay about $ 477,000. The case against The Pirate Bay and its founders was not initiated now, but in November 2011.



It was then that the Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), with the support of the Finnish anti-pirates from the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC), filed a lawsuit against The Pirate Bay.



As for the first of these organizations, it represents the interests of several major labels. Its main task is to track and stop illegal activities to distribute licensed content as a result of illegal actions of "pirates". As mentioned above, the trial lasted as much as six years, and as a result, the founders of The Pirate Bay were still found guilty of distributing unlicensed content. Behind the lawsuit and the organizations mentioned above are labels such as Entertainment Finland, Universal Music, Warner Music, and EMI Finland.



As far as one can understand, those same $ 477,000 respondents will pay together. Nothing is known about their financial condition, but I would like to hope that it is still easier to pay a little more than $ 200,000 per person than almost half a million to everyone (if, of course, they decide to submit to the court). They did not participate in the meeting, which served as another factor that led to the imposition of the appropriate verdict - after all, no one challenged the prosecution, there were no lawyers either. The court decision was made in absentia.



Another founder of the resource, Peter Sunde, was accused of having contributed to the illegal distribution of music recordings of more than 60 musicians who work for the Sony Music label. Of course, the distribution of content was carried out for a reason, and through The Pirate Bay. This defendant was also sentenced to pay $ 412,000 in damages to copyright holders and $ 65,000 in additional costs (perhaps, this refers to the cost of the lawsuit with attendant costs). He, like his colleagues, was found guilty in absentia — Sunde did not appear. After the appropriate verdict was passed, the defendant told reporters that he was going to file an appeal. “I am a public person in Finland, and they called me a criminal, although they know that they are not involved in what they accuse me of. This is an insinuation, ”said Sunde.







Peter Sunde, Fredrik Ney and Gottfried Svartholm are not the first to receive a court decision on the need to pay hundreds of thousands of US dollars to rightholders. For 8 years, they turned out to be large sums to the plaintiffs of various lawsuits. But there has not been a single payment so far, so another court verdict in favor of the plaintiffs simply increases the amount of the unpaid bill, and that’s all.



By the way, last year, Sunde said that the whole system of torrents, in general, is vulnerable. He expressed this opinion after closing KickassTorrents: “It seems to me that people do not understand that several sites are not enough. Because everything depends on these resources. I have always wanted, instead of large targets, such as KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay, there was a giant hybrid consisting of a huge number of smaller sites. "



Sunde also believes that the "mirrors" will not save the torrent resource from blocking. An example is the same closed KickassTorrents. According to the founder of the “bay”, after the closure of this resource, the administration was not able to restore its work, although it really wanted to. Yes, the network is full of copies, but they work autonomously, and KickassTorrents users cannot use their account data to work with mirrors. Also the co-founder of The Pirate Bay complained about the lack of "frames" in the field of copying content. Plus, the pirate scene lacks decentralization, in a technical sense. Sites like The Bay and KickassTorrents could use Zeronet and IPFS, but so far this has not been the case.



Let me also remind you that it was Peter Sunde who said that he was in favor of closing The Pirate Bay. In his opinion, the resource is outdated and something new is required on the pirate scene, something that most torrents do not have.