Four men behind a file-sharing website that has hundreds of thousands of British users were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay £2.5 million in damages yesterday for helping internet users to download music, films and computer games.

In a big victory for the entertainment industries, Fredrik Neij, 30, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 24, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, 30, and Carl Lundström, 49, were found guilty of breaching copyright law in Sweden, where The Pirate Bay site was founded.

The court ordered a payment of £900,000 in compensation for 21st Century Fox and £500,000 each for MGM and Columbia Pictures.

Despite the verdicts, the four announced that The Pirate Bay, which is used by 25 million people, would continue to operate from computers based in various countries around the world. The men, who plan to appeal, will not begin their sentences or have to pay compensation until the end of the legal process.

According to information provided by Pirate Bay, in one 24-hour period this year there were 3.3 million users in China, 1.6 million in the US and 824,000 in Britain.

John Kennedy, the head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, called the verdict good news for anyone “who is making a living from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will be protected by law”.

When he testified on behalf of international music companies, Mr Kennedy said that illegal file sharing had cost the recording industry billions of dollars in lost revenue.

But on the Twitter website, Mr Sunde Kolmisoppi said: “Nothing will happen to TPB [The Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release. You can view this as a TV series. This is the last episode in the first season with a cliffhanger. This will be continued.

“We are the heroes. We cannot, nor will pay [the damages]. Even if I had the money, I would have burnt it rather than pay.”

Per E. Samuelsson, Mr Lundström’s lawyer, said: “This is a justice scandal of the biggest kind. The prosecutor leads with one to nil. We will, of course, appeal.”

Another lawyer acting for Mr Neij, Jonas Nilsson, indicated that there could be a lengthy fight in the upper courts. “I expected them to be acquitted — 30 million Swedish krona is a gigantic amount. This is a case for the Supreme Court and I will take this case there,” he said.

Using a search engine and an internet protocol called BitTorrent, which enables the transfer of large files, The Pirate Bay contains information needed to download film or music files from others, many of whom have copied them without permission.

The Pirate Bay has become public enemy No 1 for the music and film industries, as concern has grown over the level of illegal file sharing. The defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was set up a year earlier by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyrån.

The website lists hundreds of thousands of “Torrent” files, which link the user to content including Hollywood films, music tracks from every leading artist and software from major companies. The site is free to use and is supported by advertising.

Lawyers for the four men had argued that no copyrighted material was actually stored on Pirate Bay’s servers and no swapping of files took place there. The site’s legal adviser, Mikael Viborg, stated that because “Torrent” files and trackers merely pointed to content, the site’s activities were legal under Swedish law.

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