File Sharing Service Owners Sentenced to Prison

First Sweden passes a new music download law requiring ISP's to turn in user's IP address if they are suspected to download music illegally, now they are shutting down one of the biggest file sharing services. Another point for the good guys.

For those new the topic, file sharing services allow users to share any file they want across the net. This is a huge problem with music downloads as it makes copyrighted material accessible to anyone for free, by-passing compensation to the artist and bands working to record them, and ultimately making it easier to steal music online. Unfortunately, there was little to do against these sites but now Sweden courts have taken a huge step.

One of the biggest file sharing services, The Pirate Bay, went to court. The 4 men who started the site were prosecuted and were sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined a total of roughly $3.6 million in damages that they will have to pay to the entertainment companies. Here's the story:

File-Sharing Site Violated Copyright, Court Says - Article from the NY Times.

It's touchy as the ones who started the site were not really hosting any of the files, but did provide a service making it very easy for users to get their hands on stolen copyrighted material by making links to these files available.

Personally, I'm happy about the ruling as it's a nice wake up call if nothing else to users that what they are doing is wrong and if you want a song or album, you need to go the right way and use one of the legal music download sites out there, but at the same time, I feel it's really the users who should be to blame and not the site owners. As an example, sports stores sell baseball bats. If a customer buys one and smashes a car window, the store shouldn't go to court for selling the bat. The action the customer decided to take using the bat was illegal and is where the problem lies, in the same way if people use a service in an illegal way, then they are to blame.

This will be another one to keep an eye on and see if it changes anything but really, if people were using a file sharing site before, chances are they'll flock to another one but at least there's a chance it'll convert a few along the way to give a try to legal music download services instead.