The Pirate Bay four defendants were found guilty on Friday by a Swedish court and sent in prison for one year. This verdict involving the four people behind the Pirate Bay which is the world’s largest Web site for free file sharing could be starting point for music and film companies to regain millions of dollars in revenues that they have been losing due to illegal downloads. 

 

The Swedish court found guilty the four defendants who were charged with accessory to breaching copyright laws. 

 

"The court has sentenced each of them to one year in prison," the court said in a statement. 

 

The defendants - Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom - were also ordered by the court to pay just over 30 million Swedish crowns ($3.58 million) as compensation for lost sales to 17 media companies. The three were charged early last year with conspiracy to break copyright law, but they denied the charges arguing that, since no copyrighted material is stored on its servers and no exchange of files actually takes place on the site, they can’t be accused. 

 

However, the court thought otherwise and found the four defendants guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing on the Pirate Bay Web site, one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations on the globe. 

 

Two of the defendants, Warg and Neij, are the founders of the file sharing Web site. Sunde is a programmer and Lundstrom is a technician that has been working for the site since 2005.