The Pirate Bay to be Charged by Swedish Prosecutors

Case partly based on evidence collected in the 2006 server raid.

This Thursday, the 31st of January, Swedish public prosecutor Hakan Roswall plans to charge The Pirate Bay with being an accessory and conspiracy to break that country's copyright law, which could lead to fines or up to two years in prison.

The real dilemma for Swedish prosecutors has always been how to stop the world's largest BitTorrent tracker site, for as the people behind The Pirate Bay have repeatedly pointed out, they don't actually host any copyrighted content, but merely the torrent tracker files which visitors use to share content with one another.

This is why it seems that Swedish prosecutors have decided to take the "accessory" approach for current copyright laws in that country prevent any other legal approach.

"It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material available," Roswall told Reuters.

"It's a classic example of accessory -- to act as intermediary between people who commit crimes, whether it's in the physical or the virtual world," he said.

Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay responded by calling the move "idiotic" and pointed out that there is "no legal ground" for the charges.

Roswall's long term strategy seems to be to dissuaded businesses from advertising on the site and choking off needed hosting and site maintenance fees. He believes advertisers could have second thoughts about using Pirate Bay if a guilty verdict is handed down. "That can be the sort of thing that influences the site in the long run."

The case is further complicated by the fact that after the previous raid in 2006 The Pirate Bay took the added precaution of scattering their servers throughout several countries so that shutting it down would be an almost Sisyphean task.

Stay tuned.