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Let us be the first the coin the phrase the “Pirate Bay Four”. When a Swedish court ruled last week that the four people behind the Pirate Bay website were to be sentenced to a year in prison each and face a cumulative fine of €2.7 million, the reaction from the entertainment industry was one of glee, and media reports were all of a ridiculous “we’ve turned a corner in the battle against illegal downloading” hue.

Pirate Bay bills its website as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker”, which essentially means it points you in the direction of sites where you can download music, film, games and software illegally for free. It’s believed that Pirate Bay’s services have been availed of some 25 million times around the world since 2003.