The dudes from The Pirate Bay go harder than anyone else in the game -- that much is undeniable. Still, they are not bulletproof. Piercing their near-invincibility (innate with being Swedish) is a new lawsuit at the hands of public prosecutors charging the torrent directory Dream Team with preparing and participating in copyright infringement. Like some sort of juiced-up Team America behemoth, the Pirate-hating coalition -- I guess you could call them ninjas -- consists of labels and studios, including Warner, MGM, Sony BMG, Columbia Pictures, and 20th Century Fox.
The defendants, then, are Pirate Bay operators Carl Lundstrom, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (not to be confused with Peter, Björn, or John). The charges reference only four computer games, nine movies, and 20 music files, but in this Red Scare/witch hunt hybrid, even "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" is potentially criminal. The Swedish prosecution team is demanding payment of 1.2 million Kronor, which I assume is a currency somewhere between Monopoly money and gold bricks, and if found guilty, the men could face up to two years in jail. Think prison in Sweden would be a cakewalk? Little known fact: HBO's Oz was based there.
Responding to all haters and potential lawsuits, the boys strike back on their site stating, "Only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site."
Apparently, 9,424,845 peers can, in fact, be wrong. John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of the IFPI, said the Pirate Bay "managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia," and went on to call the site "the international engine of illegal file-sharing." Argh, matey. We'll see who gets the booty.