The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde says that the allegations which say the torrent site's administrators have reaped big time profits off illegal filesharing are downright fabrications by the prosecution team, spearheaded by efforts from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which condemned The Pirate Bay as an "international engine of illegal file-sharing."

The site was launched in 2005 and allowed users to search a database of user-uploaded torrents. Like all torrent trackers, The Pirate Bay does not host the illegal material itself. It only allows users to connect between themselves. The Pirate Bay has been shut down several times in the past, most notably in May 2006 when police seized computers at several locations. However, law enforcement agencies have been unable to close it down permanently because it operates on the narrow line between legal and illegal.

While undoubtedly the site encourages and facilitates piracy, the site itself is not illegal. Swedish senior public prosecutor Haakan Roswall allegedly accused Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstroem, the people behind The Pirate Bay, are accused of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws," in court papers filed yesterday.

The site has about 15 million people. The prosecutor says that the four administrators have reaped a minimum $200,000 in profits off 20 music files and 4 computer game files. The four say the numbers are downright fabricated.

"In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We've been here for years and we will be here many more," says a statement on the site.

"To be honest, the things they've found regarding money is not even money that all together has something to do with The Pirate Bay. And some of the money is accounted for twice, because the money has been taxed, then sent to another company because that was the company that took care of the payments, and then sent back for paying bandwidth," said Pirate Bay administrator Peter Sunde to Ars Technica.

The first person on trial for illegally pirating movies onto the internet using BitTorrent technology was jailed for three months after losing his appeal in May last year. Chan Nai-ming, 39, was found guilty of distributing three Hollywood films using the peer-to-peer file-sharing program in 2005.

Then, in December, a federal judge in Los Angeles terminated a lawsuit against TorrentSpy because the web site provided false testimony under oath and hid and destroyed evidence, which made a fair trial impossible. The lawsuit that Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of U.S. District Court in the Central District of California ruled that because of its own actions, TorrentSpy will never be able to defend itself against those accusations.