[citation][nom]cyberdeathninja[/nom]at falchard's comment.... you're right and wrong. In the US the penalties would have gone down a lot differently... the owners of pirate bay would have gotten 20+ years, possibly life in federal prison and it would have been like 200 million in fines. RIAA and MPAA are notoriously cutthroat and have dropped multi-million dollar lawsuits on *users* let alone bigger organizations and charged people with major federal felonies, notice the FBI anti-piracy warnings in front of most American films.[/citation]
i think you yourself needs to re-read those disclaimers on the movies again, as well as the digital millenium copy right act, and the original copy right act itself as well. you will find falchard is dead on right as you can already look for torrents with google, how come the riaa and mpaa didn't go after google as they have millions more in cash? that's exactly why, they went to somebody who didn't have US law on their side as well as millions to blow mpaa riaa lawyers out of the water in the hearing alone.
copy right laws are about reproduction and distribution. as the internet was not around when copy right law was made the mpaa and riaa felt the original copyright laws were not strict enough and wanted to nail the internet service providers to the wall since they have billions in cash, the ISP's fought back on the grounds they were not allowed to stop their users actions due to other US laws and freedoms. the DMCA specifically limits the internet service providers damages for it's users actions as they are not allowed to stop what their users do in accords with other US laws.
pirate bay is no more of an internet provider then google is yet they both can find the same torrents. pirate bay just happened to make their search engine centered on torrent file searching rather then the eniter world of information legal, illegal or undeclared like google does.
liability takes a very different and tricky legal perspective as pirate bay did not post any files onto the internet nor did they reproduce any works. all they did was direct a search to where the files could be found, nothing more, and nothing less.
this case is nothing more then a bunch of angry bullys pushing around some guys for telling other people who wanted to break the law where people could do it at and not recording who it was and providing that information to the bullies so they could go after each and every person on that list for breaking the law, if they so chose. pirate bay also did nothing to bypass any anti copying protections which is another thing the DMCA was created for to cover encryption protections and to increase penalties and damages for using the internet to violate copyright law in the US. the european union has their own type of DMCA which is different from the US DMCA as people not in the united states don't have the same freedoms and rights as americans do. i do not know much of anything about the EUCD law aka european union copyright directive.
i actually took the time to read the DMCA as well as the Digital Encryption Act while billy clinton was in office and congress was deciding these and recently re-read them this week while researching how bad the wiki leaks people are going to wind up.