M. Barker, Los Angeles

A Swedish court has found Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available. The four men behind the Bit Torrent tracker, Pirate Bay were each sentenced to serve a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.54 million) to the film and music industries by Stockholm district court.

In a statement on its Web site, the Pirate Bay made clear it will appeal the ruling. “It will not be the final decision,” said the statement. “It will have no real effect on anything besides setting the tone for the debate.” The court found the defendants guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal P2P file-sharing. It ordered that damages must be paid to companies including all the majors and film studios MGM and 20th Century Fox.

In a Twitter posting, Sunde claimed that “nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theater for the media.”billboard.biz