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Swedish Court Finalizes Jail Sentence For Pirate Bay Co-Founder
Mightee sends in this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million."
Nobody knows where he is. He probably fled the country and will create a new identity for himself.
Here's to hoping, anyway.
I don't think they got rich off of TPB.
"In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$168,885.60) per year from advertisements."
"In the 2009 trial, the defense estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$112,590.40)"
That is one best excuses for not coming to court that I have ever heard!
There's DHT. Tracker sites are nothing more than a convenience nowadays.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd heard they were more like upscale college dorms than prison cells.
are you sure it wasn't Somalia?
Pirate Bay was a lot smaller in 2006 and they had mostly adult ads, not the type of ads they have now. They also didn't employ as good shell company structure with their Seychelles company as they do now.
The income with torrent sites is currently around $50 per 1000 unique visitors, mostly from toolbar (those "download from fast server now"), usenet and vpn provider ads. TPB currently has global Alexa rank #84. Quantcast currently estimates TPB gets 200k unique visitors per day, and that is only US traffic. They get huge amount of traffic everywhere from the world. But just from that US traffic alone, TPB probably makes around 200000*(50/1000) = $10 000 per day.
That translates to $3 650 000 per year, almost four million dollars. And then you also have to add traffic and income from all the other countries apart from US, which probably brings the income close to ten million dollars a year.
Posted anonymously because I have also ran a torrent site. That means, I also know the kind of income such get from ads.
I haven't seen him in any of the bars.
The summary is wrong. TFA:"This means that the Pirate Bay co-founder is sentenced to a year in jail and his share of 30 million kronor ($4.48m) in damages."
Maybe he just REALLY liked Dead Kennedys
Basic intimidation. It's the standard way to enforce a law when there are far too many violators to prosecute even a tiny fraction. Pick a few prominent examples, and then utterly destroy their lives. That will serve to scare many of the others straight.
It's very nearly almost four million dollars, though.
I ran those numbers by my Hollywood based accountant, and his calculations resulted in a net loss of about $3000 a day.
Yep, Cambodia isn't really that safe. It's much safer in Thailand for example. However, I go to Cambodia 3-4 times a year to renew my Thai visa and stay there a couple a weeks, but it always feels kind of unsafe. And last time I was there hundreds of people died on that Phnom Penhs bridge when it got too crowded. If you have to go to hospital, you really don't want to go to Cambodian hospital anyway - every foreigner should try to get to either to Thailand or Singapore in that case, and it's touted everywhere on the web. This is also why I don't think the TPB admin really had to go to hospital.
It is most definitely not quite four million.
And that worked out so well during prohibition now didn't it...?
All this does is breed contempt for the law which is evident from both your take on this and the revenue TPB is supposedly getting. When you try to regulate a natural human activity that has been with us since the age of caves or even earlier, you should expect to be both ignored and ridiculed.
And as far as the average US citizen is concerned, you run into good old fashion orneriness where those who would not even have cared about the topic will simply do it just to thumb their noses at the stupidity...
Coldmoon over Dark water...
Because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing
Yeah..... that's exactly what happened Please.. the man has money and no interest in giving it back or spending time in jail. He's long gone folks. Any sane person would have done the same thing.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
If the founder in question here was making huge numbers off TPB a few years ago (2008, maybe), it didn't show in his wardrobe, hairstyle or choice of place to crash or his mode of transportation.
I saw him staying with friends in one of the socio-economically crappiest suburbs of Stockholm and taking the subway wherever he was going.
I'm not saying he wasn't a millionaire, but if he was, it was like some character said in some (iirc) Tzingiz Aitmatov story:
"I'm just a poor person with lots of money".
I think this person is a principled person. I might be wrong, but this is the vibe I got from happening to pass him by on the street a few years ago.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I'll just go ahead and reply to myself regarding possible ambiguities in my above post:
By the comparison to the Aitmatov (?) quote, I didn't mean to imply that he came from a poor background, because I don't know about that and since his name is actually Donald Duckishly aristocratic to a swede. What I meant was that I felt he is (or at least was) true to his ... roots as an information freedom-fighter.
Also, I didn't just happen by him once, but a few times - on the streets of the "ghetto" (as far as we have them) and on the u-bahn.
Anyway. Histories of current persons in bodies, while perhaps titillating, are not more important than the ideas they put forth. So, you know, whatever.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Umm, they frequently break copyright law!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
the same labels that then deduct those costs from the artists' already small piece of the pie?
really, for a $15 cd, the people that created it should be getting at least $5.
...
Well, only the ridiculous and useless laws.