As outlined in a press release, the band had discovered that Uncase’d had performed poorly against their previous albums and after some quick searches on the web, deduced that this is all down to people downloading the album through Bittorrent sites.

Billy McGuinness of Aslan appeared on Pat Kenny and Phantom FM last week to talk about the situation and claimed that as a result of this, along with the the decline of live music and album sales have left the band needing to reassess their future.

What if McGuinness was genuinely mistaken though? Establishing true facts and figures from illegal download sites is a particularly hard thing to quantify at the best of times and it’s easy to get wrong so how did they arrive at such a large number?

In an interview on air with Phantom FM last week, McGuinness said the band collated the total amount from sites like TorrentHub which showed download figures for Uncase’d.

The problem is these figures may not be accurate as outlined by Gambra, a member of the popular alternative music Irish forum Thumped.com. When you do a search for something which does not exist as a torrent on many of these sites, the results page throws up fake torrent links with fake statistics designed to make the owner of that site some easy ad revenue.

The fake results page I looked at as linked to by Gambra show four fake links to download Uncase’d with over 26,000 downloads of these files. Each time, you refresh the page you get different set of random numbers but the files do not exist at all. You can try the same thing with your own name and you’ll get approximately, 25-30,000 “downloads” like I did for files with names like “Niall Byrne.full.rar”.

Searches for real torrents of Uncase’d throw up two real looking ones with a significantly lower share rate than Aslan have come up with (from 2 to 17 seeders, meaning maximum 17 people offering the file at time of writing but there’s no way to tell the exact amount).

Might it be a case that Uncase’d has sold less than expected because we are in recessionary times? Maybe people are being more discerning about their music purchases these days and have decided they don’t need an Aslan covers album?

Digital attempted to contact Aslan but they could not be reached for comment.

The outcome should not come as a surprise, despite relatively lax Swedish law. Just look at previous cases. Like The Pirate Bay, Napster, Grokster, Aimster, TorrentSpy and others have all claimed what’s being called the “Google Defense”; meaning that the sites don’t host the illegal material and therefore cannot be held accountable for the actions of its users. Is the car manufacturer responsible for the actions of a drunk driver? No, but when you deliberately flaunt the law, refuse to remove links to infringing files and send lawyers ridiculing letters in response (as the Pirate Bay has done on all counts), it won’t win you any friends in the entertainment industry.

Currently, the site is still operational and there are still hundreds of sites out there like it. While these types of whack-a-mole cases graduate to the uncharted three-strikes policy, it is the fully legal and open source BitTorrent, a technology which has proved itself to be a great way to distribute media to large numbers of people which may ultimately, be squashed when it should be embraced. The Pirate Bay has 3.5 million registered users so there’s definitely a potential market.

Last week the trial involving four men accused of helping millions of users download movies, games, software and music through their site The Pirate Bay begun in Stockholm. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Carl Lundström face up to two years in prison, damages of €10 million and a €115,000 fine for facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material.

The trial dubbed “spectrial”, as the defendants considered it a spectacle, has not gone according to the IFPI’s (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) plans thus far. Half of the charges against the men were dropped as the prosecutors fumbled on defining The Pirate Bay as the source of the Bittorrent files (The Pirate Bay’s computer servers never actually hosted any copyright-infringing files) and the defendants have been gaining notoriety by using their Twitter accounts to ridicule the case ranging from expressing boredom (“#spectrial is so boring. It’s sleepy”) to joy at their supposed winning of the case (“EPIC WINNING LOL”).

The rest of Europe has responded similarly. In Norway and here in Ireland, representative bodies of the music industry have called on ISPs such as Eircom to block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay. Eircom has said it will comply without question and a list of similar sites are said to also be blocked. In Norway however, the reaction is a little different. The Minister for Education Bård Vegar Solhjell has called for the legalisation of file-sharing. On his blog, he argued that the music industry should embrace the technology instead of fighting it, a pragmatic solution echoed by many advocates of Bittorrent technology.

To coincide with the Oscars on Sunday, the FBI announced that they had tracked down two Californian Bittorrent users who shared review copies of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire and Australia via the technology. The two have a week to surrender to authorities and could face up to three years in prison, or a $250,000 fine.

It’s important to note that the technology itself is not illegal rather it is the data that is shared via Bittorrent that is deemed so. Bittorrent is used to spread a lot of different media as well as copyrighted material. Low-budget documentaries, free software and non-commercial legal music (Nine Inch Nails last year used the technology to share free albums) all benefit from the technology. It has been harnessed as a way of sharing legal data for those who have not got access to costly distribution networks.

In addition, blocking sites from all users at the ISP-level can be considered censorship of public interest and a move to curtail of internet freedom. Does this rule also apply to sites like YouTube who unwittingly host a lot of copyrighted material. Will they be blocked too?

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay four are viewed as rebels in hitherto uncharted waters, sticking it to the man in court and championing technology in the process. For many younger internet users, The Pirate Bay case only serves to reinforce the bad guy image of the music industry, regardless of the outcome.