14 DAY TRIAL // Although file-sharing is not necessarily an illegal activity as long as you share your own files and don't infringe the copyright laws, some people get fined and are sent to prison for file-sharing. Such a case occurred some time ago when a 31-year-old Swedish file-sharer, Andreas Karlsson, was sent to court, being accused of sharing copyrighted content over the web. A few days ago, the judge found Andreas Karlsson guilty and announced a suspended sentence and a fine of more than 1,000 euros, AFP informs today.
According to the same source, the Swedish man shared no less than 4,500 music files and approximately 30 movies on the web but even so, he denied the accusations and sustained he's not guilty for sharing files on the Internet. What's interesting is that in this case, the plaintiffs were still famous companies such as Warner and IFPI, which have started a powerful campaign against services suspected of copyright infringement.
And because we were talking about IFPI, copyright infringement and Sweden, several copyright organizations struggled to shut down The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent website which was heavily accused of distribution of pirated material. However, the dispute between The Pirate Bay and the copyright holders has a long history as both parties accused one another and filed complaints to support their cases.
However, The Pirate Bay still exists and even if it has a lot of enemies, including here copyright holders, law firms and other organizations, its traffic is continuously growing up, reaching new milestones every new month. A few days ago, The Pirate Bay announced that it had recorded more than 12 million visitors on its website which underlines, once again, the fact that file-sharing is one of the most popular activity among Internet users, no matter if it's illegal or not.