Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall on Thursday filed charges against four people for involvement in running The Pirate Bay, one of the most widely used BitTorrent trackers for illegally distributed music, movies and software in the world.
Three of the people included in the indictment -- Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde -- are directly connected to the running of the site and have openly said so in the media. The fourth person, Carl Lundstrom, is a former CEO of operator Rix Port80 and at the time of his tenure was known as Rix Telecom. He accused of supplying hardware and bandwidth to The Pirate Bay.
According to the charges, revenue made from advertising on the Web site totals at least 1.2 million Swedish krona, equivalent to approximately US$190,000 (AU$212,048). The prosecutor is calling for the Pirate Bay four to forfeit that sum to Swedish authorities.
Along with the charges, Roswall submitted a number of invoices connected to ad revenue, in order to prove commercial interests in distributing copyright infringing material.
The prosecutor claims the four worked together to administer, host and develop the Web site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law.
In total, 34 cases of copyright infringements are listed, of which 21 are related to music files, nine to movies and four to games.