James Delahunty
2 Apr 2008 0:13
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is demanding $2,500,000 from Swedish BitTorrent Tracker, The Pirate Bay. The figure is based on 24 CDs, nine movies and four games and how many times they were downloaded. The operators of the site, Gottfried Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström, have been indicted for breaking copyright law. The compensation claim was served at the Stockholm District Court on Monday.
The Local, a popular Swedish publication, reported Gottfried Svartholm Warg as saying "the record companies can go screw themselves". The four founders of the site say that the IFPI's numbers are purely fantasy. They have always argued that the Pirate Bay is a tracking service and that it doesn't distribute any copyrighted material illegally whatsoever.
The IFPI also recently forced Tele2 to block all access to The Pirate Bay in Denmark, for which the ISP is planning to counter-sue. TeliaSoneria in Sweden also got a letter from IFPI, but claims that blocking and filtering actions are illegal under EU laws. Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask recently said she is determined to clamp-down on file sharing in the country, but a proposal calling for ISPs to shut off access to subscribers who download pirated works was rejected.
In January, public prosecutor Håkan Roswall also indicted TPB for copyright infringement, demanding a $188,000 fine. In the near future, more action against TPB is expected from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and other organizations.