I am not a lawyer but I doubt they will get anything more than a small monetary fine, if even that.
These kind of crimes are not really state priority and they are often ignored even though they may be against the law, just like piracy.
And the personal lawsuits often tend to last longer than necessary. So if the state/police doesn't do something I highly doubt that the company who owns the billboard will sue them. Especially in case like this where no damage was caused.
I'm sorry for vague response but I couldn't find any official laws that would be relevant.
Interesting. Here in the US, I can imagine a scenario where the Pirate Bay logo makes it a priority. Our government is sometimes very aggressive about anti-piracy. While it appears that the Pirate Bay logo was just put up as a humorous homage, I can imagine how a government official could perceive a deeper connection between the students and the broader piracy movement. This might be enough to motivate a prosecution.
Also, I can imagine how the state could make the case that the students were actually stealing. I.e. advertisers pay for time on the billboard, and if you take their ads down for any length of time, you've stolen the time they paid for.
In this case the Pirate Bay logo only increases number of foreign reports/articles, like the one linked. It would definitely not make any difference unless the story gets really _a lot_ of attention in western media and sort of forces officials to show the world that they're really anti-piracy; which they're not.
That's how it is pretty much in whole Balkans with maybe slight differences in Croatia.
For example: I owned a small PC repair shop in Bosnia(until ~2 years ago) and I sold copyrighted software openly even to police officers, government workers etc. in fact I even installed illegal copy of Win XP on ~15 PCs in local police station for around ~$40/PC. I never had any issues. As far as I know this would be impossible in US.
I think that shows how little governments in these regions care about piracy, a logo of PB is well... just that, an image that under normal circumstances doesn't mean anything for officials. In fact I wonder how many even know what it's about.
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Note that my experience with piracy in that region isn't really current, but it is my understanding that little changed, or at least I haven't heard anything about it.
It's also worth mentioning that the country has bigger issues than fighting piracy, and the amount of government workers/police officers/prosecutors who are educated about those issues is very low.
>Also, I can imagine how the state could make the case that the students were actually stealing. I.e. advertisers pay for time on the billboard, and if you take their ads down for any length of time, you've stolen the time they paid for.
While you are technically correct I _can't_ imagine state pressing those charges. They usually go for open and shut cases. If they want to charge them they will charge them for something vague-sounding like "illegal access to billboard/PC". Also the billboard was down for 22 minutes, that might be worth enough money in center of NY to press charges but in Belgrade I don't see it expensive enough to prosecute them for that damage.
These kind of crimes are not really state priority and they are often ignored even though they may be against the law, just like piracy.
And the personal lawsuits often tend to last longer than necessary. So if the state/police doesn't do something I highly doubt that the company who owns the billboard will sue them. Especially in case like this where no damage was caused.
I'm sorry for vague response but I couldn't find any official laws that would be relevant.