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MPAA Seeks $15 Million From The Pirate Bay

Posted by Soulskill on from the pushing-their-luck dept.

praps writes "Having tasted blood with its victory over TorrentSpy, the MPAA is now stepping up its attack on The Pirate Bay. The association is claiming damages of over $15 million, based on The Pirate Bay's distribution of four films and a TV series — Harry Potter, The Pink Panther, Syriana, Walk the Line and the first season of Prison Break. The Swedish court is unlikely to be as generous as the one in California, although the four Pirate Bay founders are already facing charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law." TorrentSpy, in the meantime, has declined to pay the settlement awarded to the MPAA on Wednesday. In addition to appealing the decision, they have filed for bankruptcy.

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Ambiguities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm puzzled about whether the pirate bay guys are just attention seekers, or if they are actually willing to potentially screw up the rest of their lives for this cause.

    They must have seen it coming and they've had a lot of time to back down.

    Either way, big balls.

  2. Re:Is the Pirate Bay rich ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm no lawyer, but first of all they certainly won't be able to pay since the numbers are RIAA pulled out of the ass, "we lost this much" numbers and hence one or two orders of magnitude above any real figure.

    However, this shouldn't matter since the chance that they are found liable is probably rather small ( "assisting copyright infringement" is not a crime in Swedish law, yet that is what they are being sued for ).

    Now if they are found liable anyway, it would still be the company that is held responsible. The individuals in question probably would not suffer from it at all, and even if they killed all of their servers it would just be weeks ( if not days ) before somebody else created a similar page with slightly different implementation, thus forcing a new investigation and court process.

    Even if the RIAA do win this case all they achieve is make TPB into martyrs and ensure that whoever succeed them will be even more difficult to stop.