Exactly one year ago The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. The entertainment industries hoped that the ruling would set an example, but today The Pirate Bay is larger than ever before.

Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker and therefore had to drop all charges of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained was the claim that the Pirate Bay folks were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. In the days that followed the defendants’ lawyers nullified the ‘assisting’ part by arguing that there was no link between the accused and users who download copyrighted material. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued the opposite and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

On April 17th 2009, the verdict was announced and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The court sentenced each of the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000.

Immediately after the verdict the defendants announced they would appeal. In the weeks that followed the news came out that the judge who delivered the verdict had ties to several pro-copyright organizations. Following this news the defendants’ lawyers decided to file for a retrial, but this request was denied.

While awaiting the appeal that is currently scheduled to take place during the summer of 2010, The Pirate Bay continued to operate. Despite efforts from the entertainment industry to shut it down the site is now bigger than ever before. At the time of writing The Pirate Bay has 4,349,457 signed up members, growing by 105 members during the time taken to write this article.

This doesn’t mean that nothing has changed though. In the months following the verdict there were plans for the site to be sold to a gaming company who wanted to transform it into a BitTorrent-powered media store. The takeover plans dominated the news for months but the deal eventually went bust in the fall of last year.

Around the same time, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay were told by the court that they could no longer be involved in the daily operations of the site. This didn’t change much either because the two had already said that they were no longer involved in its operation. All this time, The Pirate Bay continued to serve torrents to the public.

Last November, The Pirate Bay decided to close down its tracker. According to The Pirate Bay team, BitTorrent has evolved up to a point where trackers are no longer needed. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Since November, The Pirate Bay has continued without a tracker, with its website gaining more and more users month after month. This relative calm is expected to last for a few more months until the appeal trial starts. When that happens, The Pirate Bay will have close to 5 million registered users, which is 4 million more than when the legal troubles began.