Earlier this year the sentences against the Pirate Bay defendants were made final. Aside from prison sentences, they will have to pay damages to the entertainment industries, including €550,000 to several major music labels. The court awarded the damages to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses. However, it now turns out that artists won't see a penny of the money, as the labels have allocated it to IFPI to fund new anti-piracy campaigns.

February this year, Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay.

This meant that the previously determined sentences handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström will stand.

Part of the sentence are damages that have to be paid to various entertainment industry companies. EMI Music, Universal Music, Sony Music and other labels, for example, were awarded around €550,000 to compensate artists and rightsholders for the losses they suffered.

During the trial the court carefully weighed all the individual albums that were brought in as evidence. The resulting damages were eventually based on the fees The Pirate Bay would have paid if they had bought licenses for that content.

The music labels were satisfied with this outcome, but have since had trouble collecting the damages. TorrentFreak got a peek at an unpublished document from the legal department of anti-piracy outfit IFPI, which documents the issue in more detail.

“We have filed applications with Sweden’s Enforcement Agency to secure assets to satisfy these funds. So far very little has been recovered as the individuals have no traceable assets in Sweden and the Enforcement Agency has no powers to investigate outside Sweden. There seems little realistic prospect of recovering funds,” the document reads.

While it may come as no surprise that the music industry has a hard time getting money from The Pirate Bay defendants, what comes next may raise a few eyebrows.

“There is an agreement that any recovered funds will be paid to IFPI Sweden and IFPI London for use in future anti-piracy activities,” IFPI writes.

In other words, the money that the Court awarded to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses is not going to the artists at all. Instead, the labels will simply hand it over to IFPI for their ongoing anti-piracy efforts, which we documented in detail earlier this week.

According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, one of the people convicted in the case, this shows who the real “thieves” are.

“Regarding the issue that they’ve already divvied up the loot, it’s always fun to see that they call it ‘recovered money’ (i.e. money they’ve lost) but that they’re not going to give the artists in question any of it,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“They say that people who download give money to thieves – but if someone actually ends up paying (in this case: three individuals) then it’s been paid for. So who’s the thief when they don’t give the money to the artists?”

According to Sunde the news doesn’t come as a surprise.

“As far as I know, no money ever won in a lawsuit by IFPI or the RIAA has even gone to any actual artist,” Sunde says. “It’s more likely the money will be spent on cocaine than the artists that they’re ‘defending’.”

This is not the first time that artists have been left out when damages have been awarded in a copyright infringement case.

The RIAA previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” we heard.