Over five years ago, a small tracker in Sweden by the Piracy Bureau was born in what was the early beginnings of the BitTorrent era. Since then, The Pirate Bay slowly became the stuff of epics: While major trackers have been shut down and boarded up, TPB maintained some resilience that you couldn't help but be amused, maybe even proud of. They scored leaks of major films, albums, and video games like good PR coups. At times, when artists and movie studios such as Warner Brothers and ego balloon Billy Corgan beseeched them to stop uploads of their leaked movies and pirated albums, they simply posted the letters up and laughed at them. When the site was raided in 2006, protests spawned all throughout Sweden against the nature of the raids, and a political party representing the interests of these supporters (the Pirate Party) was born.
Now, after a trial jokingly referred to as "spectacular trial" or spectrial, (where several charges were dropped, wild accusations were made, and all-around melodrama and theatrics could be had by both sides), the four men who stood trial for the actions of TPB -- Peter Sunde, Fredrik Nejj, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström -- were all declared guilty of facilitating copyright infringement through TPB. According to the 107-page judgment, the four worked together as a team and "were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements." Each face a fine of 7.5 million Swedish kronor ($905,000) to the plaintiffs(a consortium of MPAA and RIAA corporations) and a year in jail. Amusingly, the judges in the verdict also declared the usage of BitTorrent illegal in Sweden. I got a feeling that won't go down too well anywhere.
Of course, the four have declared that they will appeal. Sunde, a.k.a. brokep, one of the outspoken figures of the trial, held a press conference online in the aftermath of the verdict. Comparing it to a typical episode of Swedish children's program, Sunde sees that they will ultimately get the epic win and sees this only as a setback. He notes that he was "not surprised" at the verdict, only at the prospect of jail time. He immediately disputed the facts that they worked together as a team, as well as the fact that their actions were "organized crime," calling their site much more disorganized. He was particularly surprised at the fact that the judgment was leaked yesterday to the press, which is how they first got word of the conviction themselves. At one point, he referred to the court as a "dice court," where results tend to be unpredictable. As to whether he would pay the fine, he said that even if he had the money to pay (which he did not), he would rather "burn the money and blow away the dust" than pay a cent to the plantiffs. In regards to TPB's fate, Sunde had said prior to trial that the site itself was never on trial and will continue running.
There is something to be said about this whole verdict. Many artists we write for here at Tiny Mix Tapes, as well as other sites such as Pitchfork and Pop Matters and Stereogum, have much to thank for file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay. They may not give them the immediate revenue that some artists and labels crave, but it gives them something else that's more important: fans. Fans that will go to shows, fans that will pay for merch, fans that will support them in any way they can. I am personally acquainted with an artist (who shall remain unnamed), whose own success was through the inadvertent leaking of an album to file-sharing sites such as What.cd and TPB. He is now selling out shows across the country. There are no doubt others who have had similar success. This verdict says a lot about what is wrong with the music industry's mentality towards piracy: All they see now are falling profit margins and the bottom line, lost sales where there never were any to begin with. They don't see that most people aren't just sales numbers. Some are slowly figuring this out and are now learning to earn their revenue off ticket stubs and merch sakles amongst other things. Others are still worshipping this dying god, and will do everything in their power to save it, up to the point of manipulating the government to serve them (which we will be reporting on next week). At the end of the day, while they may be morally in the right, their argument for maintaining this pyrrhic campaign is tired, and people have begun to move on.
While the labels won today, nothing can be made of this just yet.