The founders and administrators of the Swedish bittorrent tracking megasite The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available illegally in a Swedish court.

The group have been sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, and a fine of 3.6 million $USD in damages.  For the record, that’s about 30 million SEK by today’s exchange rate, one of the highest fines ever imposed in a Swedish court.

It’s a sad day for filesharers, and just goes to show how far out of touch governments and the entertainment industry are with the effects of filesharing.  When will they ever get the point that they’re overcharging for content, underpaying their artists, and strangling a situation that has been proven to actually INCREASE their sales?

Interestingly enough, the trial has not lessened traffic to the site, but rather greatly increased, swelling membership numbers to new heights, and fueling huge membership in the political Pirate Party which seeks reform of copyright laws.

Fly your pirate flags at half staff and have a look at the guilty party’s press conference on the ruling.

If you haven’t seen the awesome mixtape and music site MixTape.me yet, then you definitely should.  People are putting some interesting effort into the ancient art of the mixtape, and the results are phenomenal.  Just take a listen to this playlist made up entirely of covers…All of really good songs.

Sure, it has covers performed by big names like Johnny Cash (Hurt from NiN) and Marilyn Manson (Sweet Dreams), but more importantly, it has Jonathan Coulton (of Still Alive from Portal fame) performing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back.  Rock on.

Have you ever wanted to know more about your breakfast meat of choice?  Look no further than The Baconcyclopedia, a comprehensive and exhaustive exploration of the best bits of Babe.