Four men behind the world’s largest file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), were sentenced to a year in jail on 17th April 2009 for hosting links to BitTorrent files for users to download. On top of this, they were also ordered to pay £3m in damages to various major record companies.

The website tracks and indexes BitTorrent files - files containing data which tells your chosen BitTorrent program where to find your desired media file - into one simple search engine on what the owners proclaim is the largest and most popular on the net. Therefore, it does not host BitTorrent files but instead provides links to these hosts, which, under current Swedish law is completely legal. But after fierce lobbying from various record labels and music industry groups, the judge ruled that the website does in fact contribute to online music piracy.

There is however, one piece of hope which softens this wretched and corrupt decision, and that is TPB’s appeal. There are many reasons why a retrial should happen; I won’t even start with the obvious conflict of interest of the Judge, who is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

Firstly, what do record companies hope to achieve by suing TPB, or students who share songs across their halls of residence, or even the famous cases of a 12-year old girl and a dead grandmother? It costs so much more for their law team to sue than the money they get back, so this dictates that the action is one of principles rather than anything more significant.

Secondly, who do these people think they are to tell us that we can’t use TPB and similar websites in its perfectly legal way to find and share legitimate files? It is an incredible way for many artists to get their music out to millions of people. Furthermore, I am not a five-year old who is incapable of knowing the difference between stealing candy from a shop and paying for it. It is my choice - wait for me to commit the crime first before coming down on me. If only you took the same moralistic stance on your controversial artists who glorify guns, scantily clad women and even suicide.

I just cannot accept that file-sharing has resulted in a loss of revenue for the artist and the record labels. There is plenty of evidence to prove that this form of music piracy has only replaced copying CDs, which replaced copying cassette tapes, which replaced taping off the radio and so on. The industry also cannot accept that the CD boom is over: people just buy less of them and spread their consumption over DVDs and games, and technology such as mobile phones. Overall, there has been a global recession - people are spending less.

Now that we have clarified that file-sharing is not so bad, let us return to the court decision. I would like to know how TPB is different to Google, which helps a user find websites facilitating not just music piracy but even acts such as terrorism and child pornography. The truth is that there isn’t, and if one wants something like this to be monitored then we push more into a nanny state and eventually into Orwell’s 1984 prison. Our digital rights are just as important as our others, and if The Pirate Bay lose their appeal then we should be worried what snowball effect this will have on our digital world.