The Pirate Bay

Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison.

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 5-year-old operation.

In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 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.

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The defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way BitTorrent works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay's servers. Instead the site merely provided an index of torrent files -- some on its servers, some elsewhere -- that direct a user's client software to the content.

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

The verdict could shatter Sweden's reputation as a safe haven for content piracy, coming just weeks after a new law that took effect that allows content owners to force internet service providers to reveal subscriber data in piracy investigations.

Roswall ended his argument by demanding one year in jail for each of the defendants -- half of the maximum term. He asked for fines amounting to The Pirate Bay's gross income from advertising revenue on the site. He was able to document the equivalent of $180,000 in income from ad sales on the site, but he argued that the actual numbers are likely quite higher. Roswall claimed the site runs as many as 64 concurrent ads, which he said earned it some 10 million kronor -- about $1.2 million.

"That is pure fiction," defendant Fredrik Neij protested in the intermission. "There are four banner spaces, not 64. They have counted different versions of the same ads."

"I was startled to hear the nasty old man settling for one year only, " said co-defendant Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. "I had expected two years. Where are my 10 million kronor, please? I want them, where are they?"

Can't they just look at their bank accounts and see that the majority of the money from the ads pays their hosting bills? I guess it should be pointed out that they do not host the copyrighted material, they merely host the data that tells others where to get it from.

Next up to make his closing statement was Peter Danowsky of the IFPI. He began by saying that the trial is not about file-sharing technology, but about how it is used to infringe copyright. The goal is to find out whether or not the defendants have broken the law, and if so, what their punishment should be. Danowsky said he knew that there are other sites that engage in similar practices, but said that these are irrelevant to this case.

Comparing TPB to Google doesn't make any sense according to Danowsky, because Google is working with the rights holders to prevent piracy. TPB on the other hand constantly mocks rights holders. Danowsky further added that the number of [torrent files linking to] copyrighted works on TPB is much greater than the prosecutor decided to bring in as evidence.

Danowsky went on to state that TPB offers a service that is very similar to that offered by legal online music stores. However, TPB doesn't charge for the music and keeps the advertizing revenue to themselves instead of compensating the rights holders. Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and Lundström have contributed to copyright infringement according to Danowsky, and the record labels have to be compensated for the losses they have caused - in sales and in goodwill.

The difference is those who run The Pirate Bay mock those who assert copyright claims. That doesn't make them infringers themselves by the plaintiff's own statements.

Prosecutors dropped half of the charges in the landmark trial of The Pirate Bay file sharing site Tuesday, leaving observers stunned and prompting questions about the government's preparedness in the long-awaited criminal proceeding.

"I will drop all charges that relate to producing infringing copies and will hence restrict the prosecution to the act of making works available to the public," prosecutor Hakan Roswall announced at the opening of the second day of the trial. "When I talk about making something available to the public I mean making available torrent files."

At an intermission, Roswall refused to clarify the change of heart to reporters. "As you can see I have a lot of other things to think about," he said. "There will be new adjusted charges distributed on paper tomorrow, Wednesday."

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It remains to be seen whether facilitating making torrent files available is enough to commit the criminal act of assisting in copyright infringement.

"Absolutely not," claimed Rick Falkvinge, the leader of The Pirate Party. "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."

The only thing left is the making available charges, a phrase we've heard a lot of here in the US legal system dealing with copyright cases.

Following the lunch break, proceedings continued with prosecutor Håkan Roswall failing to start up his computer. For several minutes, listeners of the live audio could hear mouse-clicks as Roswall, who earlier claimed to be an expert on computer crimes, tried to get his PowerPoint presentation on the screen. He was eventually ordered by the judge to stick to his papers and continue.

Information was presented about various movie, music and game downloads co-ordinated by The Pirate Bay before the raid in 2006. Roswall further discussed the total number of seeds and peers on the tracker, all part of the evidence that was previously gathered by the plaintiffs. During the afternoon, Peter Sunde sent a message;

"How the hell did they think this was going to be something else than EPIC FAIL for the prosecution? We're winning so hard." Peter points out that the prosecutor is having difficulty working out the difference between megabits and megabytes.

An expert on computer crimes that can't even get a Powerpoint (ugh!) slideshow up?

A Swedish police officer involved in the investigation of file sharing site The Pirate Bay has been given a job with one of the plaintiffs in the case, film company Warner Brothers.

The officer began working for Warner Brothers job several months after the preliminary investigation was completed. The same police officer is scheduled to appear as a witness in the forthcoming Pirate Bay trial, newspaper Sydsvenskan reports.

Tele2 was ordered to shut off access last week after the court concluded The Pirate Bay facilitates the trading of copyright material without the permission of rights holders, according to a translation by the Danish Pirate Party, a digital rights activist group.

Tele2 complied, but plans to meet on Monday with other telecommunications companies on whether it should challenge the ruling, said Nicholai Pfeiffer, chief of regulations for Tele2, on Wednesday. So far, other Danish ISPs have not shut off access.

"The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden," the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said.

Where are the servers?

"It's a distributed system. We don't know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don't know it's The Pirate Bay," Kolmisoppi said. "They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don't want to know because then you'll have a problem shutting them down."

ThePirateBay has been digging through the enormous chunk of leaked email from MediaDefender, the sleazy enforcers used by the entertainment industry to fight P2P, and they've discovered evidence of illegal sabotage. So they're suing all the big movie and record [companies] in Sweden...