Prosecution calls for Pirate Bay founders to be jailed

The prosecution in the trial of the founders of torrent website The Pirate Bay has asked the court to jail the four defendants for one year.

Addressing the court in his closing summery, Prosecutor Hakan Roswall said that the founders of the site should be punished because they are guilty of copyright infringement.

He said that despite The Pirate Bay not hosting content, it does still allow users to share and download illegal files.

"A person who is holding someone's coat while they assault someone else is complicit in the crime," Roswall said, reports Swedish newspaper The Local.

Roswall also alleged that the website made around 10 million kronor (£783,000) a year.

Pirate Bay founder Svartholm Warg dismissed the claims that the website generated that amount of revenue.

"It's totally absurd, those numbers are totally disconnected from reality," he told the TT news agency during a break from court.

Warg also said he was shocked that prosecutors are only calling for a one-year jail term, rather than the maximum of two.

"I was actually surprised that he's only asking for one year, I'd expected two," he said.

"The old bastard's crazy."

Peter Danowsky, who spoke at the trail representing the recording industry association IFPI, urged the court not to give any thought to claims that The Pirate Bay was no different from websites like Google, which also offer links to illegal content.

"To say that 'So many others also commit the same crime and therefore we shouldn't be convicted' doesn't hold, and that's something to which courts never give any consideration," he said.

Today (March 3), the four defendants in the case are due to make their closing statements, before the trial is concluded on Wednesday.

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi has been giving updates on the case via his Twitter account.

What do you think of The Pirate Bay? Join the debate at NME.COM/BLOGS.