Sweden's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the prison sentences of the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing service on Hollywood's and the recording industry's most-hated list.

Peter Sunde faces eight months; Fredrik Neij, 10 months; Carl Lundström, four months; and Gottfrid Svartholm, one year. They share combined fines of more than $6.8 million.

They were convicted in 2009 in a joint civil and criminal proceeding in Sweden that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants.

Lundström's lawyer, Per E. Samuelsson, blasted the Supreme Court for refusing to review the conviction. "The verdict is absurd," he said. "I am disappointed that the court is so uninterested in dissecting and analysing the legal twists and turns of one of the world's most high-profile legal cases of all time."

Sunde wrote in a blog post that " … I'm just a pawn. But at least I'm a pawn on the morally right side. I am proud as hell of what I have done and I would not change my involvement in any way."

The defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way BitTorrent works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay's servers. Instead the site merely provided an index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user's client software to the content.

But the judge in the case did not buy it. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall argued successfully that the defendants were culpable anyway, citing past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend's coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable.

Among other arguments on appeal, the founders asserted that the trial judge was biased against them.

Days after the convictions, attorneys for the four charged that Tomas Norstrom, the judge presiding over the trial, was hostile to the defense because of his affiliations with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

The defendants also charged that the Stockholm trial court administrators secretly steered the case to Norstrom.

It was not immediately clear when the four would be required to surrender.

Torrent Freak noted that the site was still online, but was redirecting to a .se domain out of fear of a "possible seizure from the U.S. authorities."

Photo: m.a.r.c./Flickr