In a reaction to The Pirate Bay convictions, the Pirate Party took a seat in the European Parliament late Sunday.
The party, formed to protest copyright law, took 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden and one of that country’s 18 seats in the European Parliament.
The party gained a renewed focus in Sweden after the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker, were convicted of copyright infringement and ordered jailed for a year and fined millions.
After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.
The verdict triggered a political backlash among Swedish youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size to 40,000-plus members, giving the anti-copyright party a genuine shot at landing a seat in the European Parliament.
In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.
The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.
In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun moving toward legitimacy.
The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users, keeps operating as usual, despite the convictions, which are on appeal.
The European Parliament consists of 785 members and is one of the governing bodies of the European Union.
