The Pirate Bay tracker has gained impressive popularity in the 5 years since its establishment. The fact that they are now being dragged to court is nothing new for its creators, as they have faced copyright infringement allegations on several separate occasions. Companies such as Microsoft, DreamWorks, EA, Apple, SEGA, Warner Bros. and others have written email to the website owners, demanding the removal of copyrighted material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

 

The strange thing about all this is that the Digital Millennium Act is a copyright law that applies to the United States, and The Pirate Bay servers are located in Sweden. But leaving that aside, the intentions were clear, companies didn’t want their work to be made available by the BitTorrent tracker.

 

Less than three years ago, The Pirate Bay was raided by Swedish police, at their Stockholm headquarters. This resulted in the website remaining offline for several days, after the police confiscated the servers and forced the website to shut down.  But the effects of the police raid lasted for a few days only, and The Pirate Bay was soon back online.

 

The problem with that police raid was that, according to some sources, it was the result of political pressure from the United States on government agencies.

 

In an e-mailed response to DreamWorks’s 2004 request to remove all infringements on the Shreck 2 motion picture, which The Pirate Bay made public, the tracker responded: As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law doesn’t apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

 

But The Pirate Bay’s attitude seems to displease Swedish companies as well, not only American companies. Ludwig Werner, Chariman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Sweden, said in a statement last week that for people who make a living out of creativity, it is important to have their rights protected by the law.

 

Furthermore, they should also have the right to choose how their creations get distributed, and they should get awarded for their work.

 

The operators of The Pirate Bay have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show, they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves, Werner continued. That kind of abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of the creative community, he concluded.

 

The defendants, Gottfrid Svatholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom, have rejected the allegations, saying their website does not host copyrighted material, but instead redirects users to that content. The prosecution however says they are responsible for providing the means to access copyrighted material.