Prosecutor Vows To Charge The Pirate Bay With Piracy

Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall has vowed to file charges against the internet's foremost BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, for breaches of copyright law and conspiracy to help others breach copyright law using evidence obtained in a high-profile raid of the lair of the anti-copyright rogues last May, according to Swedish newspaper The Local. The prosecutor has until June 1 to file charges.

Quinn Norton has been all over this story for Wired News, and her profile of the Pirate Bay stewards is a must read.

Tobias Andersson, one of the taunting rogues who runs the Pirate Bay, responded to today's news with the Swedish equivalent of "Bring It On" combined with a big yawn:

We expected this. And of course we don't think they will succeed. I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid.[...]

We will most likely be cleared as it is obvious that there is no copyrighted material on the site, there are just links to other places. Whatever the outcome, we will continue. If we are outlawed in Sweden we will continue elsewhere. There will be no downtime.

Police seized servers and other computers from the site in last year's raid, a search that followed urging from the Motion Picture Association of America. But the site was quickly restored. Though the Pirate Bayers vow to destroy copyright, they say the site doesn't host the copyrighted first run movies easily found on its site – it hosts tracker files. That argument hasn't fared very well in the States, but Sweden has far more lax copyright rules.

Prosecutor to Press Charges Against Pirate Bay