A Sad Day for Pirates around the world

Pirate Bay defendants found guilty, sentenced to jail

Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 17, 2009 2:59 AM | permalink

The four defendants in the Swedish trial of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and $3.6m fine. I don't know much about Swedish copyright law -- and the defense rested on the technical boundaries what constitutes an infringement -- so I have no idea if this is the kind of judgment that is likely to survive the inevitable appeal.

A more interesting question is whether The Pirate Bay will disappear now. After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it's certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course -- just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more "moderate" services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).

It's a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that's dedicated to their destruction.

Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.

Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.

They were forced to drop the charge of "assisting copyright infringement" and focus on the lesser charge of "assisting making available copyrighted content". They had been seeking SKr115m (£101m) in compensation for loss of earnings due to the millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.

The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdict

Previously:

• Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm: Day 1 - Boing Boing
• Steal This Film: Pirate Bay Trial edition - Boing Boing
• Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm: Day 3, the King Kong defense ...
• Pirate Bay offering crypto tools to fight Swedish spying laws ...
• PirateBay's OscarTorrents - download the Oscars - Boing Boing
• Pirate Bay suing major media companies for sabotage, based on ...
• Pirate Bay trying to buy Sealand, offering citizenship - Boing Boing
• How Sweden's "Pirate Bay" site resists the MPAA - Boing Boing

Prosecutor drops a charge in Pirate Bay case

Huge win for the Pirate Bay in the Swedish prosecution of the BitTorrent search engine: The prosecutor has dropped one of the major charges against the four men who run the Bay, IT World reports.

Prosecutors dropped a charge for aiding in the copying of copyright works, because they couldn’t prove copies of the content were made. The music industry blustered:

It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works,” [industry lawyer Peter Danowsky] said in a statement.

Ummmm … “making available”? I have no idea what Swedish law says, although I believe European law comports with U.S. Copyright law, which pretty clearly has been interpreted as requiring an actual distribution. Read back on the fate of the “making available” theory here and here and here.

Evidence presented on Tuesday included screenshots showing computers were connected to The Pirate Bay’s tracker, or software that coordinates P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. But a majority of the screenshots show that The Pirate Bay was actually down at the time and that the client connections timed out. The clients, or peers, were still connecting with each other, but through a distributed hash table, another protocol for coordinating downloads unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

Pirate Bay file-sharing defended

The founders of a website which carries links to copies of music, films and TV program's have gone on trial in Sweden on charges of copyright theft.

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high-profile file-sharing site and is being taken to court by media firms including Sony and Warner Bros.

The men face up to two years in prison and a fine of $143,500, if convicted.

"File-sharing services can be used both legally and illegally," defence lawyer Per Samuelsson said.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi and Carl Lundstorm have portrayed themselves as digital libertarians and say that they cannot be prosecuted for copyright theft because none of the content is hosted on their computer servers.

The men are accused of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws", according to charges filed by senior public prosecutor Haakan Roswall.

Representatives of the movie, music and video games industry are seeking about 115 million kronor (10.6 million euros) in damages and interest for losses incurred from tens of millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.

FROM THE BBC WORLD SERVICE More from BBC World Service

"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," Mr Samuelsson said at the opening of the trial, which is expected to last three weeks.

He said the site "can be compared to making cars that can be driven faster than the speed limit".

Monique Wadsted, a lawyer representing media firms, including Warner Bros and MGM, involved in the case said: "It's not a political trial, it's not a trial about shutting down a people's library, and it's not a trial that wants to prohibit file-sharing as a technique.

It's not a political trial Monique Wadsted, lawyer

"It's a trial that regards four individuals that have conducted a big commercial business making money out of others' file-sharing works, copyright-protected movies, hit music, popular computer games, etc."

The Pirate Bay, which was founded in 2003, directs people to "torrent" links, which allow file-sharing program BitTorrent to download and upload files among potentially millions of users.

They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again Gottfrid Warg

Swedish police raided the company's offices several times and seized nearly 200 servers in 2006, temporarily closing the site. But it re-opened a few days later with servers hosted in different countries.

Mr Warg, in a webcast on Sunday, said: "What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again.

"It has a life without us."

John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries, representing 1,400 member record companies worldwide, said: "The Pirate Bay has hurt creators of many different kinds of works, from music to film, from books to TV programm's. It has been particularly harmful in distributing copyrighted works prior to their official release.

"This damages sales of music at the most important time of their lifecycle."

Mr Kennedy said the four men had "made substantial amounts of money" from the site, "despite their claim to be only interested in spreading culture for free".

On Sunday, Mr Sunde said: "It does not matter if they require several million (kronor) or one billion. We are not rich and have no money to pay."