Prosecutors in the Pirate Bay trial have finished their closing arguments, and requested jail terms of 12 months apiece for the four men who run the torrent search site.

In his closing arguments prosecutor Håkan Roswall asked the court to sentence the four defendants to one-year jail terms, half the maximum sentence, for breaking copyright law. He argued that, although the site did not contain pirated material, it was nevertheless a facilitator to piracy.

"A person who is holding someone's coat while they assault someone else is complicit in the crime," he said, according to Swedish paper The Local.

Roswall estimated that the site brought in over $1m (£709m) a year in advertising revenue, and is a business rather than a hobby site. As such, stiff penalties were needed.

Svartholm Warg, one of the defendants, questioned the revenue figure. "It is totally absurd. Those numbers are totally disconnected from reality," he told the TT news agency. "I was actually surprised that he's only asking for one year. I'd expected two."

Roswall acknowledged the defence argument that the EU directive on e-commerce states that web sites are not responsible for information transferred through their domains, but maintained that an EU ruling was not needed in this case.

"It does not mean some sort of immunity for middlemen. And there is no reason to request an opinion from the European Court," he stated.

The site's operators, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, also face a demand for $12.7m (£9m) in damages.