REUTERS/BOB STRONG
PIRATE
BOOTY
Internet, attracting more followers.
“I wasn’t surprised that there were
people interested in this movement;
I had done the math, and I knew that
there were 1.2 million in Sweden sharing
culture at the time, so I knew there was
the potential for a significant movement,”
Falkvinge recalls. “But I was surprised at
how quickly people found out about us.”
To qualify as an official political party
in time for the Swedish elections the
following fall, they needed to get 1500
signatures by the end of February. They
thought they could save time by collecting them electronically, but election
authorities informed them that they
needed physical signatures.
“It actually turned out to be a good
thing,” Falkvinge says. “Because it gave
us a reason to meet, organize and gel as
a group.”
Within days, Falkvinge’s group had
registered as a political party.
Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay was in
trouble. Swedish officials raided its
servers in the summer of 2006, shutting down the site. The founders restored service to The Pirate Bay using a
backup three days later, but in 2007, the
Swedish Prosecution Authority told the
founders — and Carl Lundstrom, the heir
to a cracker fortune, who had underwritten the site — that they were under investigation for copyright infringement.
HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
Reporters swarm a court clerk to obtain copies of the verdict
in the 2009 Pirate Bay file-sharing trial. A Swedish court
handed all four defendants a guilty verdict and sentenced
each to a year in prison, in addition to a $3.58 million fine.
Lundstrom and the founders lawyered up and a trial got underway in
early 2009.
Jonas Nilsson, Neij’s attorney, said
that the defense claimed that TPB’s
founders couldn’t be held liable for
copyright infringement because their
site was a “passive, automatic service.”
All it did, the defendants said, was tell
users where to find information about
downloading files (files which might or
might not have been copyrighted).
The court didn’t buy it. It sentenced Neij
to a year in prison and demanded that he
pay damages of 30 million Swedish kronor.
Other defendants got similar sentences.
Falkvinge, who attended the trial, said