Flour Power

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most (in)famous file-sharing site, is being taken to court by media firms including Sony and Warner Bros. The trial started Monday in Sweden, and should take about 3 weeks. At the start of the trial in Stockholm, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi (founders) and Carl Lundstorm (a sponsor) were facing a 1.2 million kronor (around €108.000) fine and up to two years in prison, if convicted.

The Pirate Bay is said to have between 10 and 15 million users around the world and has been already been “attacked” with several legal threats, which they promptly ignore and post on the website, claiming that they’re not breaking any law. In May 31st 2006 though, the swedish police raided the company’s offices and seized about 200 of its servers, shutting down the site for some time (it was up again by June). And now Hollywood and the music industry are charging at them.

Per Samuelsson (the defence lawyer) had this to say at the opening of the trial:

File-sharing services can be used both legally and illegally. It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law. [the site] can be compared to making cars that can be driven faster than the speed limit.

Yesterday, on the second day of the trial, prosecutor Håkan Roswall had to drop the charges of assisting copyright infringement. It seems the charge had been made without a thorough knowledge of the technology involved. The thing is, The Pirate Bay (and several other such sites) uses so called “trackerless torrents,” which use a Distributed Hash Table, or DHT, and don’t rely on a torrent tracker at all. This rendered the “assisting copyright infringement” claim invalid, leaving only the lesser charges of assisting making copyrighted material available remain. And according to Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party, not even that is going to stick:

If they can claim that facilitating for others to publish a torrent file, which contains no copyright protected information whatsoever, then this shows that they want to shut down the internet for good.

I can’t wait to see how this ends. It will probably have some impact on the overall file-sharing scene. And I’m definetely supporting the pirates. Arrrr!