[Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay trial starts on Monday

[Richard Forno]

Pirate Bay trial starts on Monday

Published: 12 Feb 09 16:56 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/17554/20090212/

http://www.thelocal.se/17554/20090212/

Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The  
four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged  
with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or  
up to two years in prison if found guilty.

Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl  
Lundström are accused of 33 cases of alleged copyright infringement.

The trial will last 13 days, public prosecutor Håkan Roswall told The  
Local.

As organizers of the site, the defendants are “promoting other  
people's infringements of copyright laws," according to charges filed  
by Roswall in January 2008.

Roswall declined to comment on the case while it is still ongoing but  
when charges were filed he called for the four to pay damages of 1.2  
million kronor ($185,000) to the Swedish state.

The Pirate Bay is a bittorrent tracker which allows registered users  
to download files from other members– enabling movies, music, games  
and software to be downloaded for free.

"It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an action  
that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material  
available," Roswall told Reuters in January 2008.

The Pirate Bay argue on their web site that, “only torrent files are  
saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and or illegal  
materials are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the  
people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is  
being spread using the tracker.”

Defendant Sunde was defiant when he told Reuters, "it's idiotic. There  
is no legal ground (for the charges)."

Premises connected to The Pirate Bay were first raided in 2006. The  
complexity of the case led to delays in charges being filed and the  
case being bought to court.

The site is also facing sizable compensation claims from record  
companies and the Motion Picture Association of the United States.

"The record companies can go screw themselves," said Pirate Bay  
founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to The Local on learning of the claims  
in March 2008.

The Pirate Bay is ranked as the 109th most popular web site on the  
internet by web information company Alexa.

The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started  
in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån.

Revenue is made from advertisers as members are not charged to use the  
site.

Stay tuned to The Local for comprehensive coverage of the trial. And  
brush up on the background to the case with a look through our  
archived articles on The Pirate Bay.