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The verdict against three people assoiated with the BitTorrent tracking site Pirate Bay was upheld by the Swedish Appeal Court today. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström were found guilty of "contributory copyright infringment" in April, but the group appealed the sentence - which included one year in prison and a sizable fine. Today's ruling upheld that conviction, decreasing the length of the prison sentence, but increasing the damages that the trio will have to pay to more than $6.5 million.

Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials told media.

The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites.

Thanks to a DMCA complaint filed with Google, the company's search index now doesn't feature the Pirate Bay's homepage anymore and the Pirate Bay's PageRank has been dropped to zero. Now, when users search for 'Pirate Bay,' a link to the DMCA complaint and a notice that explains that a number of search results were removed from the page appears at the bottom of the page. Interestingly, though, the Pirate Bay hasn't fully disappeared from the search results and a link to piratebay.org/browse still appears on the first page.

Black Internet, the Pirate Bay's largest bandwidth supplier, just shut down the notorious BitTorrent tracker after a court ordered it to pay a fine of 500,000 kroner ($70,800). Since about 9:30am PT, the site has been inaccessible. Just a few months ago, the Pirate Bay announced that it had been acquired by Global Gaming Factory (GGF). This sale, however, started to fall apart over the last few days. Unless the Pirate Bay can find another ISP, it will remain inaccessible until the outcome of a civil suit against the company can be resolved.

The Pirate Bay is like a gigantic inch worm. If you cut it down, it's various pieces rise up and keep growing. As The Pirate Bay prepares to be passed on to Global Gaming X AB, the service is offering the ultimate legacy gift to users. It looks as if an anonymous user uploaded the entire site's archive in order to ensure that multiple backups exist in case torrents are removed post-purchase. Users who would like to download an archival copy of the site, can access it as a massive 21.3 gigabyte download for free.

According to their blog and a recent BusinessWire release, controversial Swedish bit torrent tracker the Pirate Bay, is being acquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB for roughly $7.8 million in cash and shares (or $60 million SEK).

On the blog, the group hopes to alleviate concerns by saying:
"If the new owners screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want it to. And - you can now not only share files, but shares, with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat off us."

Today, a court in Sweden found four members of the Pirate Bay guilty of breaking Swedish copyright laws and sentenced them to a year in prison and a $3.6 million fine - a third of what the prosecution had asked for. The Pirate Bay and its lawyers will, of course, appeal the verdict, and the site will continue to function normally during the appeals procedures.