The founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking service, are now facing jail time and a hefty fine. A Swedish court found Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law. The four were sentenced Friday morning to one year in jail and US$3.6 million in damages.

The Pirate Bay Fight

The ruling follows a fight stretching back to 2006. That’s when Swedish police first raided the Internet company hosting The Pirate Bay’s servers. Formal charges were filed last January, though they were later lessened: Prosecutors dropped a secondary charge of “assisting copyright infringement” and went only with “assisting making available copyrighted material” instead.

The Pirate Bay Verdict: What’s Next

Don’t expect to see any sudden change from all of this. The Pirate Bay Web site is still online and active as of Friday morning. A message on the home page calmly and confidently states:

“Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. :-)”

Further in the site, the founders get slightly more defiant.

“So, the dice courts judgment is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict,” states a message posted on a special press conference page. “But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing Hollywood ever taught us.”

One of the men told reporters he has no plans to pay a dime of the fee, saying he would “rather burn everything [he] own[s] and not even give them the final dust from the burning.”

The Pirate Bay team has already indicated it plans to file an appeal that would take the case to the Supreme Court. It could be years before any verdict there is reached.

See Steven Hodson’s take on the news: “The Pirate Bay boys heading to jail and Google keeps serving up files”