Much like their previous logo of the mythological creature Hydra and their supposed slogan \u201cif you cut off one head, many more will arise\u201d, Pirate Bay never seems to go away or be out of the headlines!<\/p>\n
The founders of the infamous torrent site, Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstr\u00f6m finally caught a break. Recently a Belgian Court, at Mechelse found the quartet not guilty on charges of criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2003 by the fiercely anti-copyright organization \u201cThe Piracy Bureau\u201d, as the name suggests, Pirate Bay has been plagued by legal allegations since the days of its inception. The site was initially run and managed only by Svartholm and Neji, later joined by the others. The site soon started getting attention from\u00a0not only hordes of users but also the authorities and angry copyright holders. It was their utter disregard towards the requests of these copyright holders and authorities that led to the start of their legal troubles. All four founders were found guilty by a Swedish Court for \u00a0the unauthorised use of copyrighted material and were awarded a sentence of one year and a fine of $4.8 million. However, later the sentence was reduced but the fine was hiked.<\/p>\n
The present acquittal is with relation to a separate legal process against the four founders. The charges of copyright infringement, forgery and abuse of electronic communications were alleged against them. According to The Pirate Bay four, all their ties to Pirate Bay were severed in 2006 when they sold the company and site to a Seychelles-based company called Reservella. They have ceased their involvement with the file sharing platform since then. The Court ruled in their favour and stated there was nothing to show that they were connected to the site between September of 2011 and November of 2013, when charges were alleged against them. The prosecution failed to furnish adequate evidence to prove the charges levied against them.<\/p>\n
This victory does not end all their legal woes, but does give them a reason to rejoice.<\/p>\n
Contributed\u00a0by Ayush<\/p>\n
Sources- here<\/a>, here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a><\/p>\n Image Attribution\/Source- here<\/a>, goverend by Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Belgian court acquitted the Pirate Bay founders of criminal copyright infringement, citing lack of evidence of involvement after 2006. This verdict provides temporary relief, though their legal battles continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":28,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[7331,31,7333,1710,5,7332,2398,7334],"class_list":["post-26027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyrights","category-intellectual-property","tag-belgian-court","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-criminal-law","tag-file-sharing","tag-intellectual-property","tag-legal-acquittal","tag-pirate-bay","tag-torrent-websites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26027"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133161,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26027\/revisions\/133161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}