Last year, four unassuming-looking men faced a courtroom in Stockholm charged with facilitating the distribution of copyright material. It was dubbed the internet piracy trial of the decade and for good reason – the four were behind the world's most notorious yet massively popular file-sharing website, the Pirate Bay. Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström operated a service used by 22 million people. Set up in 2003, the peer-to-peer service acted as a "middle-man", indexing film, music, game and software files – the vast majority of them illegal – thus allowing others quickly to find and download them direct from the person uploading.
(Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:01 +0000 - Click:1790) More...