The Pirate bay a year after the sentence

A year ago, the four creators of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year in prison, and in addition to this, everyone must pay a $ 905,000 fine. The entertainment industry hopes that the ruling will serve as an example, but today Pirate Bay is even bigger than before.

Millions of BitTorrent users around the world have watched The Pirate Bay trial. Many hoped that the court would decide that the tracker’s actions did not contain a crime and the accused would be released.
The first ten days of the trial began with a small victory for the accused. On the second day, the prosecutor stated that half of the charges were dropped - he could not prove that the .torrent files used as evidence were used by the TPB tracker and therefore had to abandon all the charges of "promoting copyright infringement."

There was only a lawsuit that the creators of TPB "helped to make available copyrighted content." In the following days, lawyers for the defendants nullified the allegations of “help”, arguing that there is no connection between the accused and the users who download the protected material. The prosecution, on the other hand, claimed the opposite and provided screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

On April 17, 2009, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were convicted and convicted of “promoting copyright infringement”. The court sentenced the defendants to a year in prison and a fine of $ 905,000.
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Immediately after the verdict, the defendants appealed. In the following weeks, there was news that the sentencing judge was associated with a copywriter. After this news, the defendants' lawyers decided to file a referral, but the petition was rejected. In anticipation of the appeal, which is scheduled to be held in the summer of 2010, TPB continues to work. Despite all the efforts of the entertainment industry, it is growing: at the moment, there are 4.349.457 users registered on the tracker, while writing this article it has increased by another 105.

This does not mean that nothing has changed. For several months after the verdict, there were plans to sell the site of the gaming company, which planned to make it a BitTorrent store. The takeover plans were discussed in the news for several months, but in the end, last fall, the deal fell through.

Around this time, two of the founders of TPB told the court that they could no longer manage the daily administration of the site. Last November TPB decided to close the tracker. According to the TPB team, BitTorrent has evolved to such an extent that trackers are no longer needed. “We advise other tracker admins to use magnet links,” said a person from TPB, adding that they might even stop using torrent files in the future.
Since November, TPB is still without a tracker, and the site only grows from month to month. It is expected that this relative calm will last several more months before the start of the appeal of the trial.
When this happens, TPB will have about 5 million registered users, which is 4 million more than it was when the problems with the law began.