http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334
"The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)
Well, you can say that "the prosecutor said this and the defendant counsel said this", but at the end of the day we know that the four operators of the site were convicted by Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million Swedish kronor (approximately US$3.5 million, €2.7 million) in fines and damages.
Well, for one, that the fines and damages were n has no bearing on what profit the site made, if any.
And, two, given the current legal environment in most of the West including Sweden, "the court believed the prosecutor" doesn't mean shit, really. Of course the court believed the prosecutor - they are on the same team, after all.
From what I remember the defense never provided any counter-claim about how much money tpb made. All they argued was that the prosecutors claim was ridiculously high. Exactly how much money the ad networks paid out is not publicly known but wire transfers are tracable. So it seems obvious to me that if brokep and anakata during the trial wanted to prove how much or how little the tpb made, then it would have been easy for them to do so.
Can you try and persuade me that TPB wasn't making substantial revenue when you have millions of daily visitors and a hell of a lot of ads? It seems a pretty simple assumption to make. What factors were in place that stopped that revenue flow?
Uses go to Google.com to not pay for search... yet Google makes oodles of money.
I've never paid for StackOverflow, TheDailyWTF or CNN.com yet somehow they all keep running.
Using website X witout paying doesn't mean website X makes no money.
How much they make can be argued, but to think they don't rake in mad money (Look at how much contemporaries like Dotcom made)... is a bit shortsighted to say the least.
The fine was based on what a theoretical license would cost per infringing item, multiplied if I remember correctly by 4. The theoretical license cost was created from estimates by the plaintiffs.
... according to the prosecution, who pulled those numbers out of thin air, with no actual evidence what so ever. You see parts of that in the TPB - AFK documentary.
