Their apparent invulnerability to prosecution has made them heroes of the Internet piracy movement, but not everybody feels the same way.
"I certainly don't see them as romantic pirates: it's out and out theft," says John Kennedy, chief executive of the international music industry body IFPI. "It's pure, ruthless greed -- or total naivety."
But the group's supporters around the world say they are vexed with what they see as the "corruption" of the media industry. "This is already happening -- you cannot stop it," says Magnus Eriksson of Piratbyran, the Swedish thinktank which helped start the Web site in 2003. "But the thing is that the people who download the most are also the ones who spend the most on buying media. Media companies already know that they have to change."
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