Pirates in the Hold?

On April 17, 2009, a Stockholm court found the proprietors of the website The Pirate Bay guilty of contributory copyright infringement and meted out sentences including fines and prison terms of one year. The Pirate Bay site uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol, which allows visitors to specify a desired file and then to download small pieces of the file from multiple sources and reassemble it on their own computers. Until July 2005, providers of peer-to-peer services in Sweden were protected as long as they themselves did not engage in any unauthorized copying. Effective July 1, 2005, Swedish copyright law was amended to prohibit the contributory act of making copies of copyrighted works “available to the public” without authorization. The convictions are being appealed and the website is still up and running pending the appeal. The question raised by the defendants at trial – now more relevant following the decision – is whether Google and other search engines that can be used to locate files for peer-to-peer sharing are now vulnerable to prosecution under Swedish copyright law.