Global Piracy Crack Down

In what appears to be a systematic global piracy crack down, and hot on the heels of the iiNet case, copyright owners including Warner Bros, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI are seeking approximately $18million in damages from file sharing website The Pirate Bay in a Swedish Court.

In the claim it is alleged that the website was used in the infringement of copyright, by allowing pirated movies, music, software and computer games to be downloaded.

In their defence, The Pirate Bay (yes a very unfortunate name in this type of matter) claims that no copyrighted material is stored on its servers, and no exchange of files actually takes place on them, that they are not responsible for any copyright infringement.

In addition to the potential damages claim, the four men who operate the site could face up to 2 years imprisonment.

The success of cases like this will do very little to stop global intellectual property infringement, but what is may do is reduce the number of people prepared to take the risk of deriving a commercial benefit from operating these types of file sharing sites.