Sweden to indict Pirate Bay owners by end of month

The Pirate Bay's days are increasingly looking numbered as Sweden will move this week to press charges against its owners for copyright infringement.

Charges will be filed in a district court in the country on January 31. If the owners are successfully convicted, they may be forced to pay fines and spend up to two years in jail.

While the actual copyrighted material is not hosted on The Pirate Bay's own servers, its search engine actively links to material elsewhere. This makes the site's owners what are called accessories to the crime of copyright infringement.

Both the IFPI and MPAA have been calling for Sweden to come down hard on the site's owners, and that pressure seems to be apparently finally be paying off. However, the site remains defiant, saying it cannot be held responsible for others hosting pirated material.

A Pirate Bay spokesperson told Reuters that there was no legal grounds for the charges, and called them "idiotic." But the Swedish government sees it otherwise, although it said that it would take more than just legal action in that country to take it down.

Due to the decentralized nature of the BitTorrent protocol, the infrastructure for the site is spread across many countries. Thus, a guilty verdict may not stop the site, and its owners are vowing to continue on.