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A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.

Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as "bizarre".

"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said.

"It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

e damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m in damages and interest the firms were seeking.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

"These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

"The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn't even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said.

The Pirate Bay's first server is now a museum exhibit in Stockholm

The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong.

Speaking on Swedish Radio, assistant judge Klarius explained how the court reached its findings.

"The court first tried whether there was any question of breach of copyright by the file-sharing application and that has been proved, that the offence was committed.

"The court then moved on to look at those who acted as a team to operate the Pirate Bay file-sharing service, and the court found that they knew that material which was protected by copyright but continued to operate the service," he said.

A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson, told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence.

"That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."

Political issue

Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was "a gross injustice".

"This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.

"There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it.

"Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament."

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.

This is already possible thanks to a gadget called GigaPan Epic which can create images 1,000 megapixels in size.

The robotic device can be mounted on a standard digital camera to capture hundreds, even thousands, of photographs which are then assembled into one panoramic image.

David Bergman's 1,474 megapixels image of President Obama's inauguration speech is fast becoming the poster child of this new slice of technological innovation.

The GigaPan device works by taking many zoomed-in snaps of the landscape, with each one at a slightly different angle.

These photographs are then stitched together by software on the user's computer - but beware that this process can take a very long time, even on a high-end PC.

Photographs of static objects are merged together seamlessly, but moving ones can create a ghostly effect.

There is a buzz around Gigapan not only because it is visually impressive, but it is finally entering the realm of affordable consumer tech.

What began as a research project for taking detailed shots of the Red Planet, is now within the reach of keen photographers.

Nokia launched the 5800 in the US last Friday

Nokia is investigating reports of problems with its touchscreen 5800 phone in the US, just days after the mobile was launched.

The device has been removed from sale at two flagship stores in the US.

The problem is with connections to US 3G networks, BBC News has learned.

A spokeswoman for Nokia said: "A small number of devices are not connecting with 3G networks and we are looking through that right now."

She said the phone continued to be sold in "certain network areas".

At the New York and Chicago flagship stores only the European version of the Nokia 5800 is on sale.

Sales agents at the New York store are telling customers the phone has a "little issue" and they are "not being sold at all while the problems are looked into".

Nokia launched the 5800 Xpress Music phone in the US last Friday and the device has been described as the firm's response to the iPhone.

The European version of the 5800, which cannot access 3G networks in the US, is still being sold and is unaffected by the problem, BBC News understands.

Less frequent replacement is just one aspect of the projected PC sales slump

The PC industry will see a decline of nearly 12% in 2009, analysts predict.

It would be only the second period of negative growth in the industry, after a slump of 3.2% in 2002.

The news follows an announcement that the semiconductor industry saw a 35% drop in sales of computer chips between 2008 and 2009.

However, analysts say the chip industry will weather the global economic storm better and rebound faster the rest of the technology sector.

"The outside economic situation that we've seen deteriorating over the last few quarters is now directly affecting the PC market and we're going to see growth slump over the next year," said Ranjit Atwal, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The shift in the health of the market was a sharp one. European PC sales were at 20% in the third quarter of 2008; the fourth quarter saw a dive to just 4%.

In 2009, Gartner predicts, those numbers will plummet into the negative. They say that the global market will see 257 million PCs sold in 2009, a downward slide of 11.9% on 2008.

The market dive that occurred in 2001-2002, Mr Atwal said, was primarily from the corporate side of the market.

This time, both individuals and businesses are predicted to buy less PCs, hanging on to ageing computers for longer as part of general belt-tightening.

"The PC market is much more mature [as compared to 2002], and the PC is relatively more important to consumers," Mr Atwal said.

"But nevertheless, it's still a luxury item, it hasn't gone all the way that it's a necessity.

When things go wrong like this, the chip industry actually goes into full gear Malcolm Penn Future Horizons

"That means if your PC slows down, doesn't work well, doesn't do what you think it should do, you'll live with it."

Some facets of the PC industry are clearly on the up - such as mini-laptops and netbooks, which are projected to ship 80% more units in 2009 than 2008.

However, with just 8% of the overall market share they can't make up for the slide of the PC industry as a whole.

Weather storm

The semiconductor industry is also facing negative growth: from the third to fourth quarters of 2008, the industry slumped by nearly a quarter.

Computer chip makers may be better off than computer makers

However, the industry was already scaling back and through "purely good luck" may have not have been caught off-guard as badly as other industries, said Malcolm Penn, chief executive of semiconductor industry analysts Future Horizons.

The industry as a whole had been aiming to cut back on production, driving demand and making the industry more profitable when times were good.

"The only way you can do that is by controlling capacity; they had been investing more and more in capacity and getting less and less back for it," said Mr Penn.

"The chip industry has a very different cost structure; low marginal cost and very high fixed cost, so trimming back is actually quite hard. As long as you have a little bit of positive cash flow you can keep going."

With the timely arrival of a recession, the innovation cycle of semiconductor firms actually speeds up, he said.

"When things go wrong like this, the chip industry actually goes into full gear, doing what it does best - which is inventing itself out of the problem," said Mr Penn.

"This is a good time to restructure, to do the things that you never bother to do when things are humming along."

That means the next-generation of chips will come sooner, even if the market is such that demand for them only slowly creeps up.

Surveillance is a fact of life in many of the UK's towns and cities

In November 1988 Stuart Weir, at the time editor of the New Statesman, published a special edition of the magazine asking those concerned with the health of British democracy to stand up and be counted. The proposal, which he called 'Charter 88', called for a new constitutional settlement, one which would guarantee civil liberties and the rule of law.

Shortly afterwards 348 people paid for and signed an advert in the Guardian newspaper asking people to offer support, and a year later an organisation called Charter 88 was founded to take the campaign forward, with Anthony Barnett as its first Director.

The Charter was eventually signed by over 85,000 people, including me, and the organisation it inspired continues to campaign for democracy, rights and freedoms as Unlock Democracy.

It would be fascinating to trace the history of this important movement, and perhaps watch some of the barnstorming speeches that took place at its many public meetings over the years, but there seem to be no recordings and few accessible records of what happened in the early days.

Google's archive search of old newspapers will sell me a scan of a 1988 article from the Miami Herald that talks about Charter 88 for only $2.95, but I can find no public scans of the original advertisement and there are no video or even audio recordings of any meetings, while the Wikipedia entry for Charter 88 is flagged 'This article needs additional citations for verification'.

The online presence also meant that many people who could not be there were able to participate, using the two-way nature of the web to feed back into the real-world meetings British 'careless' with liberties

There's a book, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the original Charter 88, but that is only available to order as a printed volume and Amazon won't let me search inside it.

Since I am fortunate enough to have access to the British Library and even to the offices of the New Statesman, where I'm an occasional contributor, I could hunt down the original 1988 edition if I really wanted to and see just how the case was argued.

As I'm a friend of Anthony Barnett's I could ask him if he has any old material I could look at, and if I was really keen I could offer to digitise it and put it online for him, but I probably won't because time is short and building digital archives takes a lot of time and effort.

My interest in Charter 88's history came about because yesterday I was one of over a thousand people who attended the Convention on Modern Liberty at the Institute of Education in London's Bloomsbury district, organised by that same Anthony Barnett and journalist Henry Porter.

Repressive actions

It brought together dozens of different organisations and hundreds of speakers in seven cities across the UK, beginning with a passionate defence of our civil liberties from Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti and finishing with an informal debate that included blogger Cory Doctorow and songwriters Billy Bragg and Feargal Sharkey.

Although there were many horror stories about the repressive actions of the representatives of the British state there was also significant optimism and a sense that things could be changed if we choose to change them.

And unlike the early Charter 88 meetings, some of which took place in the same lecture hall I was sitting in, every moment of the convention was being recorded and documented in detail.

The plenaries and panel sessions were being filmed and webcast live, with transcripts taken and posted online as soon as possible after the words were spoken, while the wireless network throughout the building enabled me and many others present to twitter about what we were doing.

The rise of the web has caused problems for personal privacy

Large number of photographs were uploaded to Flickr, Moblog, Tweetpic and other photo-sharing sites, and as well as coverage in the obvious media outlets like the Times and the BBC there are already dozens of blog postings, some from those who were there, some from those who participated online.

The interaction and engagement that these services facilitate was a vital part of the convention, tying together the eight separate meetings with video feeds and online debate and turning them into one nationwide event. The online presence also meant that many people who could not be there were able to participate, using the two-way nature of the web to feed back into the real-world meetings and not simply sitting there are observers of a broadcast video feed.

But the real significance may come in six months, a year or even five years, when the issues the convention raised form the basis of political campaigns, government policy or even a new Bill of Rights for the UK. Charter 88 grew up before we had moved into the digital age and what little was recorded remains analogue, offline and inaccessible.

Yesterday's event was self-documenting, and much of what happened left traces online, traces which will be visible to anyone who wants to know what happened. Ben Goldacre's jokes, David Davis' call for action and Philip Pullman's eloquent and moving condemnation of a government that refuses to believe in the British people will be there, to be watched, read, linked to and commented upon over the coming months, and this in itself will help to strengthen and build the movement that seems likely to emerge from the Convention.

Of course, it also means that the authorities will have no problems tracking down who was there or what they said, but transparency and sharing always carry the risk of undesirable side-effects.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He was an advisor on online strategy to the Convention organising team.