Pirates jailed: is it the answer?
Updated on 17 April 2009
The men behind one of the world's biggest file-sharing websites have called their sentencing by a Swedish court a "crazy verdict" and plan to appeal.
But Britain's technology minister told Channel 4 News that large scale criminalisation was not the solution to piracy.
The four, who run Pirate Bay, have been found guilty of breaching copyright law and sentenced to a year in jail by the court and ordered to pay almost £3m in damages.
The site helps more than 20 million users find out where to download content for free, losing the industry billions of dollars.
It is a test case that could lead to music and film companies being able to recoup millions of dollars in revenues lost through illegal downloads.
Pete Waterman
Krishnan Guru-Murthy spoke to the record producer, Pete Waterman. He put it to him that some people believe the internet has been a good thing for the music industry and artists.
In an interview with Channel 4 News Lord Carter said of the Pirate Bay prosecution:
"If we have the large scale criminalisation of everyday activity that's a bad outcome, what we're trying to do, or at least investigating in the Digital Britain report is to create some background legislation which avoids us getting into the situation where the Swedish courts have got to.
"We will go for legislation that places an obligation on internet service providers.
Who pays for these obligations? It's not clear to me that if the benefit of those obligations is being shared across multiple players, the cost of the obligations should fall solely in the hands of the ISPS (Internet Service Providers), even if they can control that.
"We also need we need a culture change."
