Despite some early fumbling by the prosecution, a judge in Sweden handed down a guilty verdict today in the case against The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent search site. The four founders, who still seem to think this is a big joke, each face one year of jail time and a $3.6 million fine. The site will continue to function for now as they appeal the decision.

Even though the Pirate Bay does nothing more than point to other places on the Web where people can find BitTorrent files, including both legal and illegal downloads of music, movies, and other content, the court ruled that the Pirate Bay assisted in wholesale copyright infringement. Nobody should really be surprised by this ruling. In the past, companies such as Napster and Grokster got into trouble in U.S. courts for similar types of “vicarious infringement” and “inducement” to infringe.

The music industry still spends an inordinate amount of money on legal fees (although it has come down from the $140 million it used to spend annually, not counting whatever it cost the RIAA to go after those 35,000 file-sharers before they decided that was not a cost-effective policy). And it will continue to spend money going after big sites where file-sharers congregate. That is the stick part of its carrot-and-stick business model. They are still trying to figure out what the carrot will be, but increasingly it looks like licensing ad-supported streams on the Web.

In the meantime, people will continue to download or stream free music wherever they can. Even if the Pirate Bay is ultimately shut down, there are already plenty of other torrent tracking sites ready to take its place. One of them, Mininova tracks nearly as many torrent files (1.13 million versus 1.7 million for The Pirate Bay) and already has more Web visitors. According to comScore, Mininova had 26.2 million unique visitors worldwide in February, versus 14.6 million for the Pirate Bay and even old-school torrent-tracker Torrentz had 13.7 million and has been running neck-and-neck with the Pirate Bay in terms of visitors. Other estimates put the Pirate Bay users at 20 million.

Regardless of what happens to the Pirate Bay, torrent freaks have plenty of other options and always will. If the music industry really wants to fight illegal file-sharing, it needs to work on planting more carrots.

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The Pirate Bay may get all the headlines, but BitTorrent directory Mininova continues to grow. Stats from the site above (some are public, some via a non-published link) show the site is quickly racing towards 5 billion downloads after having only passed 4 billion February 18.

On comparison, Mininova comes out ahead on traffic. The Pirate Bay doesn’t offer a download figure, only concurrent users, with the site having passed the 10 million user mark in January. Both Alexa and comScore rank Mininova in front of The Pirate Bay, Alexa ranks The Pirate Bay at 101 to Minivova’s 52. comScore records over 30 million monthly page views for Mininova to Pirate Bay’s 24 million.

The break down of what is being downloaded is interesting. Video (movies and TV) make up 60% of the downloads on Mininova vs 19.55% for music. TV Shows are the most popular category at 38.7%; if we presume the music industry is broken based on illegal downloading, wouldn’t the demand for TV shows also demonstrate that the TV business is in trouble as well, even as services like Hulu try to offer a legal alternative?

One thing that can be taken away from these stats: that BitTorrent isn’t going away, its general usage and acceptance in the community is accelerating despite attempts by the RIAA and others to harass users.

(thanks to Ashley Smith for the tip)

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