A little over two weeks ago a Swedish court sentenced four individuals to a year’s imprisonment and to pay multi-million-dollar fines, having been charged with facilitating copyright violation en masse. This offence was deemed to be perpetrated by their creation and administration of torrent-tracking website, The Pirate Bay.

This ruling marks the latest skirmish in a war over intellectual property rights. It has been hailed as a victory, as justice rightly served, by enforcers and proponents of copyright law; and so it should be, right? If a serial fraudster or predatory rapist is put behind bars for life, people applaud the triumphant judicial system and celebrate, and yet this case, while comparably high-profile, has engendered completely the opposite phenomenon: protesters lined the streets opposing the trial. Illicit file-sharing itself saw a significant rise also, buoyed by The Pirate Bay’s media exposure.

So, why so much public support for people who have been branded criminals? Well, the simple fact is that a considerable portion of Internet users do not view piracy as a crime. A recent survey by the National Consumer Council indicates that more than 50% of British adults have infringed copyright at some point, and it would take a brave soul to bet against most of those being repeat offenders. Anti-copyright campaigns are rife, founded on principles that the average consumer could relate to:

Imagine you invite a friend around for the evening. You watch a DVD that your friend legally owns, in your home. Believe it or not, in the strictest terms of copyright law, that’s illegal, but I’m very confident that 99.9% of you would not find that activity plaguing your conscience. Now, say this friend can’t make it that evening, but you still want to watch that DVD, so they send it to you through the post, as a gift. Still no problem with it? Now say they send it to you in digital form over the Internet. You see where this is going? The Pirate Bay is a global online service where users share such content as films, music and games. It is easy to see why people are so vehemently opposed to the restrictive principles of copyright law. Even though you legally own a copy of the content which entitles you to personal use, beyond that the use, reproduction and distribution of it are legally determined by the copyright holder.

Swedish essayist and anti-copyright ‘freedom fighter’, Rasmus Fleischer, expressed in a detailed (but albeit slightly biased) work, titled ‘The Future of Copyright‘, his belief that “Copyright law in the 21st Century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses,” impinging on the liberties of both innovators and consumers. Given the recent case of The Pirate Bay, this claim would appear to have some weight. In fact, it becomes all the more poignant when considering that, in one report on the Pirate Bay trial on BBC News, an interviewee was openly identified as a Pirate Bay user on national television. While this user may only use the site for the exchange of uncopyrighted materials, the irony is all too apparent.

Fleischer argues that after constant amendments to and layering of copyright law, the Internet will render it obsolete; that the authorities will never be able to second-guess Internet users who persistently find loopholes in the law.

The pro-copyright argument is much more straightforward. As you will have no doubt seen, governments have issued advertisements stating that piracy is a crime just like any other, regardless of how it is embellished and wrapped up in technology and the anonymity of the Internet. The film industry in particular claims that piracy is killing it due to losses in revenue, affecting its more humble employees as well as A-listers and top execs.

No doubt this debate will rage on for many years yet. All four individuals of The Pirate Bay are due to appeal their convictions.