AfterDawn: News

IFPI seeks $2.5 million from The Pirate Bay

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is demanding $2,500,000 from Swedish BitTorrent Tracker, The Pirate Bay. The figure is based on 24 CDs, nine movies and four games and how many times they were downloaded. The operators of the site, Gottfried Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström, have been indicted for breaking copyright law. The compensation claim was served at the Stockholm District Court on Monday.

The Local, a popular Swedish publication, reported Gottfried Svartholm Warg as saying "the record companies can go screw themselves". The four founders of the site say that the IFPI's numbers are purely fantasy. They have always argued that the Pirate Bay is a tracking service and that it doesn't distribute any copyrighted material illegally whatsoever.



The IFPI also recently forced Tele2 to block all access to The Pirate Bay in Denmark, for which the ISP is planning to counter-sue. TeliaSoneria in Sweden also got a letter from IFPI, but claims that blocking and filtering actions are illegal under EU laws. Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask recently said she is determined to clamp-down on file sharing in the country, but a proposal calling for ISPs to shut off access to subscribers who download pirated works was rejected.

In January, public prosecutor Håkan Roswall also indicted TPB for copyright infringement, demanding a $188,000 fine. In the near future, more action against TPB is expected from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and other organizations.

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Written by: James Delahunty @ 2 Apr 2008 0:13

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• 12 comments

• xSModder

  April fools?
  If not, that sucks, they'll be definitely getting a cut of my paycheck.

  2.4.2008 01:19 #1

• Pop_Smith

  So what else is new? :P Microsoft and lots of other big shots have threatened TPB yet they are still up and running.
  
  They had their servers raided back in 2006 and they were back up and running in 2-4 days because the police couldn't find anything illegal on the servers (due to a .torrent file being nothing but a special text file).
  
  It should be fun watching this one though.
  
  Peace

  2.4.2008 02:11 #2

• nintenut

  I'm gonna go out on a limb here: 2.5mil the IFPA isn't going to get.

  2.4.2008 03:55 #3

• domie

  If it is an April Fool's joke - then it's straight back in the face of the poster - look at the time it was posted 23:13 at night - everyone knows you can only play April Fools jokes until 12 mid-day. Therefore we have to assume the report is true.

  2.4.2008 05:51 #4

• 7thsinger

  TPB isn't going anywhere for any real length of time.
  
  I'll be following this one.

  2.4.2008 08:34 #5

• susieqbbb

  This is funny.
  
  First Piratebay is a search engine not a real tracker the tracker portion of the piratebay doesn't concern me because most of there trackers now suck no one is using them company's like apple and microsoft and even adobe is releasing torrents under the piratebay tracker to track down people stealing there software and sueing them.
  
  This is why i stopped using them was because i received a threatening letter from comcast and apple which i thought was kinda funny but because i was able to prove i owned the original disk and had the original disk and was able to fax a copy of the original disk to them they dropped the letter.

  2.4.2008 10:49 #6

• xempler

  As usual those idiots are scratching their heads trying to figure out what a torrent is and how it works.
  
  So out of frustration they slap a $2.5 Million lawsuit to Pirate Bay even though they haven't broken any laws. LOL, if anyone there had half a brain they would've figured that out.

  2.4.2008 11:36 #7

• Icanbe

  I'm not wishing for this to happen or anything like that, But you gotta wonder sometimes how many blows TPB can take before they have to give it up or move to another country.

  2.4.2008 16:36 #8

• wetsparks

  Quote:"the record companies can go screw themselves"That pretty much sums things up.

  2.4.2008 17:02 #9

• r0b0t3ch

  Originally posted by xSModder: April fools?
  If not, that sucks, they'll be definitely getting a cut of my paycheck.
  April Fool's was YESTERDAY! Stay with us man. Depending on what country/world you live in....................it's either the 2nd or the 3rd of April now.

  2.4.2008 17:46 #10

• c1c

  TPB makes a TON of money from advertisers, the 2.5 mil is about a month for them. No prob.
  
  Let's move to Sealand.

  2.4.2008 20:38 #11

• nintenut

  Originally posted by r0b0t3ch: April Fool's was YESTERDAY! Stay with us man. Depending on what country/world you live in....................it's either the 2nd or the 3rd of April now.And the story was posted YESERDAY. Stay with us man.

  2.4.2008 22:08 #12