[Infowarrior] - Verdict: The Pirate Bay Guilty

[Richard Forno]

The Pirate Bay Guilty
By Wired Staff EmailApril 17, 2009 | 5:28:00 AM
Categories: Yo Ho Ho

Tpb Oscar Swartz reports.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/pirateverdict.html

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

Sunde, The Pirate Bay's spokesman, announced the news over Twitter  
Friday morning before the verdict was official. He remained defiant,  
and offered comfort to supporters. "Stay calm -- Nothing will happen  
to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a  
theater for the media."

The two week trial, which ended March 2, was a joint civil and  
criminal proceeding that pitted the entertainment industry and the  
government against the four defendants, who each faced up to two years  
in prison and fines as high as $180,000. In addition, motion picture  
and record companies sought $13 million in damages for the 33 movies  
and music tracks at issue.

The verdicts are a significant symbolic victory for Hollywood, the  
record labels and the rest of the content industry that claims online  
piracy costs them billions of dollars in lost sales.

"The Pirate Bay has claimed all the time that their activities are  
legal," Henrik Pontén, a lawyer who represented the film and computer  
game companies in the trial, told the Swedish media. "Now that it has  
been proven illegal we presume that they will stop."

The Pirate Bay crew, though, has vowed to continue running the site  
whatever happens, and claims that it is secured from a forced shutdown  
through a network of distributed servers located outside Sweden.

For now, the attention brought by the highly-publicized trial has only  
made The Pirate Bay more popular. The site has swelled to some 22  
million users. And thousands of Pirate Bay fans have flocked to sign  
up for its new $6 anonymization VPN service, which allows torrent  
feeders and seeders to conduct their business in private without  
leaving a trace of their internet IP addresses.

And since the trial began, membership in Sweden's copyright reform  
Pirate Party has grown 50 percent, while its youth affiliate is now  
the second largest in Sweden.

Even if The Pirate Bay is ultimately shuttered, dozens of other  
illicit BiTtorrent tracking services are easily accessible.

The defendants are expected to appeal, and they remain free pending  
further proceedings.

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.

But supporters of copyright reform hope that the trial will energize  
Swedish youth.

One minute after the judgment was public Friday, Sweden's Pirate Party  
issued a press release claiming: "The verdict is our ticket to the EU  
Parliament", referring to the election that takes place in the  
beginning of June.

The party's top candidate, Christian Engström, comments: "Sweden has  
now outlawed one of our most successful ambassadors. We have long been  
a leading IT nation but with these kind of actions we will be left  
behind and become dependent on other nations' arbitrary views".

Reached by e-mail after the verdict, defendant Gottfrid Svartholm  
Warg's sole comment was: "Like a dog!" --  the condemned Josef K's  
final words in Franz Kafka's The Trial.

In a web-only press conference held two hours after the verdict, Sunde  
was more upbeat, invoking Hollywood in explaining why he still  
believes The Pirate Bay's crew will ultimately prevail.

"We see this as a film," he said. "This is the first set-back for the  
heroes. ... In the end we know that the good guys will win, as in all  
movies."

Last updated 7:30 a.m.