Thepiratebay.org trial update

Thepiratebay.com, the world's largest BitTorrent tracker

The founders of online piracy juggernaut The Pirate Bay (blocked on the SU network) are on trial for their website’s exploits in Sweeden this week, and the case is proving to be extremely compelling for anyone interested in filesharing and internet rights.

The Pirate Bay, started in 2003, bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker,” a place where people can easily go to download pirated movies, music, and television shows, sometimes before they are released to the general public. Its founders, Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, and Peter Sunde are notoriously defiant to law enforcement and threats of copyright protection action, perhaps most famously telling Dreamworks Pictures to “please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons” and ignoring their threats because U.S. law doesn’t apply in Sweeden.

Unfortunately law enforcement did get to them eventually, and now they are in court for both a civil case (against the IFPI, who represents the recording industry, as well as other groups representing the film and television industries) AND a criminal case against Sweedish police. With the trial now in it’s fifth day, here’s an update on what has gone on so far.

Supporters of The Pirate Bay outside the courtroom. Photo by Rick Falkvinge.

The first day of the trial was a spectacle, a place where hundreds of supporters gathered, waving pirate flags and supporting the defendants. There was almost a constant flow of information through web services like Twitter, where people in the trial could communicate with supporters outside. The opposing sides made their opening statements, and supporters were very vocal about what was going on.

“Should the Internet be a place where everyone can communicate or should it not? That’s the question of this trial, and no court can answer that question. Even if The Pirate Bay would be freed all the way through the court system, the problem isn’t solved,” said Christian Engström, Vice Chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party in an interview with file-sharing news site TorrentFreak. “The Copyright Lobby will demand more restrictions and tougher laws and the only way to protect social media culture in the long run is to work politically.” The Pirate Party is currently working on getting seats in the Sweedish parliament.

Engström also explained that the trial is more than just a prosecution of The Pirate Bay. It is a question of the future of communication.

The second day saw the prosecution drop half the charges against the founders, citing the fact that they don’t have clear evidence that The Pirate Bay actually distrubuted the files rather than just making them avaliable. The official charges went from “assisting copyright infrigement” and “assisting making copyrighted material avaliable,” to just the latter, which was a huge victory for The Pirate Bay. For anyone who knows how the BitTorrent protocol works, The Pirate Bay isn’t actually hosting the files, but rather only providing a central place for people to find the content, which is distributed on a peer-to-peer network, free of any kind of central server. The Pirate Bay itself never sees any of this pirated content, only “instructions” on how to get to it. It was a huge victory for the defense.

On the third day the prosecution outlined their demands: According to IFPI’s Peter Danowsky, the damages requested from The Pirate Bay are the same as if the site had ‘legally’ recieved a liscense to distribute its content, regardless of whether all the downloaders had later decided to buy the music or not. They are trying to say that one download of a file means one lost sale, and that The Pirate Bay should compensate the recording companies for that lost sale. The damages approach $13 million. The defenses’ response was that since the actual copyright infringement charges were dropped, The Pirate Bay shouldn’t be held responsible and the founders should be aquitted.

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” defense lawyer Per E Samuelsson told the court.

The drama of the trial continues today, and I’ll be following the results anxiously. This has huge implications for the future of information freedom on the internet.