Tuesday, half of the charges that had been previously brought to the four founders of the Pirate-Bay file-sharing website have been dropped.

On the second day of the trial, the Swedish prosecutors dropped the charges concerning enabling the website’s users to violate copyright laws, yet they kept the ones related to helping make copyright material available to users.

Speaking of the turn of events, Pirate-Bay co-founder Frederik Neik said that it had only gone to prove that the prosecutors had misinterpreted the purpose of the website and the way it worked.

In their turn, the music companies involved in the case as plaintiffs said that the fact that the charges had been dropped had been merely a technical issue that was not to change anything where their compensations claims were concerned, Peter Danowsky, legal counsel for the companies, stated.

Moreover, Danowsky added that in fact, prosecutors having dropped half the charges had rendered the case simpler for them, since they could concentrate on the bigger picture, which consisted in having made copyrighted material available for file-sharers.

Pirate-Bay was launched back in 2003 and it managed to make its mark really fast, becoming the world's most high profile file-sharing website within a short period of time.

This month only, the website revealed it had registered 22 million simultaneous users.

The four defendants, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 28, Peter Sunde, 30, Fredrik Neij, 30, and Carl Lundstrom, 48, have been accused of having violated the Swedish copyright law for having enabled web users to download protected music, movies and computer games.

Pirate-Bay website does not host content protected under copyright laws, yet it offers Internet users guidance so as to find and download films, music or other protected material via torrents.

Pirate-Bay is financed by Carl Lundstrom, while the other three men administer it.