source: Artsdb
The trial of Pirate Bay started on February 16 as one of the main Internet privacy trials of the decade. The four defendants - Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström – all confident of winning, pleaded non-guilty. They however face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2m kronor (€108,324) after being accused of enabling millions of Internet users to make illegal downloads of music, movies, games and software.
The Sweden-based Pirate bay site – the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker – had an estimate of 25m active users. The four men were raided in 2006 and then charged for facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material. Music and film companies have also brought a civil claim, the music industry claiming compensation of €2.2m while the film industry claims damages of €10.9m.
‘It´s not merely a search engine,’ Public prosecutor Hakan Roswall told Reuters in January 2008. ‘It´s an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material available.’ Indeed the website lists hundreds of thousands of torrent files the link to content such as big Hollywood films and music tracks from major recording stars, as well as software from leading companies.
The trial is going well for the accused, according to Fredrik Neij. Indeed the prosecution misunderstood how BitTorrent works, and Neij pointed out that Roswall couldn´t prove the torrents presented as evidence day one were in fact using The Pirate Bay as a tracker. Additional flaws in the prosecution’s evidence led to half of the charges being dropped. The trial was originally scheduled to last until March 4 but could end a lot sooner.
More information:
