As all of us know who've been keeping up with the news lately, pirates have been weaseling their way back into the headlines. I am speaking, of course, about Pirate Bay...which for those of you in the know, was a software pirating site...getting busted. And damn, did they get busted!
A Swedish court on Friday found the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty, sentencing each to one year in jail. The defendants were also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants. The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site.
-Gamespot
OY! That's a lotta booty! Now these guys have to spend a year in prison, thinking about what they did, and the rest of their friggin' lives trying to figure out how to pay these people back! Now, as a high profile super-villainesque type person, I know how it feels to have a run in with the law. Superhero's routinely show up and tear down your operation just when you've gotten everything sorted out. Then you have to go and find more henchmen and a new lair and start all over from scratch. And when a super-villain gets caught, we get put in a special prison...where we rest...consort with other super villains...and eventually escape.
These guys though...are inordinately boned. And not just because simply pronouncing their names shoots spittle from your mouth like an UZI. I think this is a lesson to us all.
Game-industry plantiffs included World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment, its new corporate sibling Activision (Call of Duty 4), and Sierra Entertainment, which was subsumed into Activision Blizzard last summer.