all hands on the poop deck

Swedish courts are likely to drop a deuce on The Pirate Bay's poop deck sometime in April.

The infamous bittorrenter has provided frugal media patrons with some 600,000 torrents since 2003, from remastered Perfect Strangers episodes to blockbusters months from their theatrical releases. Having just weathered raids by Scandinavian authorities, the site's operators were blindsided by recent charges of "facilitating copyright infringement" filed by several major American film studios, among them, Warner Brothers and MGM.

While the defendants intended the site to be something of a virtual speakeasy for file-swappers worldwide, they've since renounced their hippie culture-sharing angle in the face of a possible two years of imprisonment and millions in fines and damages.

Defendants claim that the site doesn't actually host any of the unauthorized media but simply directs its 22 million users to those files through torrent trackers. Defense furthers that since the accused merely operate the medium, they cannot be accomplices to particular acts of the site's users of which they are unaware (at least under Swedish law).

I still think the operators could have avoided this predicament had they the good sense not to christen their site an allusion to the illegal act they hoped to get away with.