Flour Power

After about one month since it started, the Pirate Bay trial has finally come to an end, and it wasn’t a happy ending…

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation. Each of them was sentenced to a year in prison. In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor (€2.7 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.

Sunde announced the news over Twitter before the verdict was official. He also reassured the supporters that nothing too bad will happen, and was calm enough to joke about the situation:

Stay calm – Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing what so ever. This is just a theater for the media.

Really, it’s a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.

This is a symbolic victory for Hollywood and the record labels, who are thrilled about the decision, even though they were initially aiming for €10 million.

Good job Hollywood and friends! Now you just need to go after the other… hhmm… thousands of torrent sites. Good luck on that! And I got news for you: you can find all the torrents you want just by using Google! I want to see you go and sue them…

Just look at one of the arguments the prosecution used when faced with the fact that no files are stored on The Pirate Bay servers:

But prosecutor Håkan Roswall argued successfully that the defendants were culpable anyway, citing past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend’s coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable.

How ridiculous is this? Now I’m afraid that they’ll sue me if I reveal the great secret of how to find torrents using Google (no I’m not, you just have to add filetype:torrent to the search query).

And there’s also the claim that The Pirate Bay made the industry lose millions in sales. Why can’t they figure out the difference between losing and not-winning? And how can they prove that every download would be a sale if said download wasn’t available? Morons…

Anyway, not all is bad news. All the press around this case made The Pirate Bay even more popular, pushing it to 22 million users. And according to the crew, the site is secured from a forced shutdown through a network of distributed servers located outside Sweden. Also, since the trial began, membership in Sweden’s copyright reform Pirate Party has grown 50 percent (let’s get them to the EU Parliament!).

Go pirates! Arrrr!

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!