A Swedish court has ruled against the founders of the Pirate Bay, a file-sharing Web site. The four men, on trial for infringing on film and music copyrights and making the copyrighted works available, were sentenced to jail and fined Friday.

Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstroem were sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay compensation and damages totaling $3.6 million. A message on their site before the judgment vowed that "the losing party will appeal."

After the verdict Friday, this message was posted on the Pirate Bay:

So, the dice courts judgment is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict. But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That's the only thing hollywood ever taught us."

The Pirate Bay was charged with making copyrighted materials available to Internet users for free through BitTorrent.

BMG, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. were among those accusing the Sweden-based peer-to-peer site and its operators of copyright infringement. They sought more than $12 million in revenue losses.

The defendants caught a break from prosecutors in February, when charges were reduced. Prosecutors acknowledged that the Pirate Bay didn't copy or produce the copyrighted material, and pursued instead charges that the site's operators were complicit in making the copyrighted works available.

The move was attributed to "largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against the Pirate Bay," Peter Danowsky, the lawyer representing the music companies in the case said at the time.

The Pirate Bay launched in 2003.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on the business uses of social networks. Download the report here (registration required).