Swedish Pirates on Trial

On February 16th, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, founders of hugely popular torrent site The Pirate Bay entered a Swedish courtroom. The three (hereafter referred to as “the Pirates”) stood in the Stockholm district court, alongside Swedish millionaire and Pirate Bay donor Carl Lundström, accused of “assisting copyright infringement” and other related offenses, by running the torrent tracker, which reportedly has some 22 million users.

The case was filed over a year ago by various industry groups on behalf of heavyweights including BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. This was serious business: the prosecution was seeking to reclaim more than $100 million in damages and the defendants were facing two years in prison and fines of up to $180,000 each, on top of the damages. 

So how are four men with 22 million raucous supporters faring against some of the biggest media companies and industry groups in the world?

Well, it’s not over yet, but one thing is for sure: these are four cocky bastards. And whether you see them as swashbuckling Swedish freedom fighters or lowlife copyright busters, you’ve got to acknowledge their brass balls.

The Pirates have faced many battles before, with raids on their facilities, and Danish and Italian courts ordering those country’s ISPs to block access to the site. But with 22 million active users, the Swedes aren’t going down without a fight. The area around the court had been turned into a circus, with groups of the site’s supporters broadcasting, Twittering and blogging every second of the proceedings, organizing buses for supporters to picket the courthouse, and even the spectacle of a brass band in the street – probably not a common sight in Stockholm.

A few minutes of this hour-long video will give you a taste of the spectacle (partially in English):

The Pirates went in with a pirate attitude, blogging and giving interviews in which they denied responsibility for the actions of the site’s users, laughing off the charges, and mocking their foes – though in the courtroom they sometimes seemed more like frightened children. Still, on day two of the trial the mockery was justified, when half the charges against them were dropped, due to flaws in the prosecution’s evidence.

The part of the case relating to “assisting copyright infringement” was withdrawn, leaving the site’s founders and investor to face charges relating to “assisting making available” the tools for copyright infringement. Unfortunately for the prosecution, they found they could not actually prove that the torrent files used as evidence were even related to the Pirate Bay – in fact some of the images of torrent files shown to the court clearly stated they had no connection to the Pirate Bay.

Bringing charges against a torrent site without understanding how the technology works? Oops.

An industry lawyer put on a brave face, stating “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.”

One week later, the prosecution settled on a new approach: skirt around the technical complexities of the site’s activities, and try to prove something more general. They again altered the charges, this time excising most of the technical aspects, and trying to focus on proving the Pirates were complicit in facilitating copyright infringement generally. 

The obvious question: how many times can you alter the charges in a Swedish criminal trial?

On February 26th, with the the charges now presumably fixed, the industry took a slap from defense witness Roger Wallis, a songwriter, record company founder and Research Fellow at Gothenberg University. Wallis testified that the financial losses to piracy claimed by the industry were grossly exaggerated (previously in the trial an industry bigwig had laughably tried to claim that downloaders would otherwise have purchased every single music track they had downloaded). Wallis infuriated the prosecution by stating that the record labels and film companies were attacking a “never before seen transfer of resources from intermediaries like record companies to the creators themselves”.

Never call out a middleman for being a middleman. It is only his invisibility that makes his livelihood possible.

The proceedings were twice suspended when things got overheated. The industry lawyers attacked Wallis’ credentials – in response he offered to whip out his resumé. In the end, the judge asked whether Wallis required payment for testifying as an expert witness. He said no, but that he would accept flowers for his wife. 

Pirate supporters watching worldwide via webcast immediately launched web sites and Facebook groups in support of Wallis, and his home was deluged with flowers. 

At the end of the day’s proceedings, the prosecution sank to another low, dragging out two unrelated criminal cases against the Pirates. One was accused of having participated in a drunken burglary as a youth, another charged with possession of small amounts of drugs found during a Pirate Bay raid in 2006. On the bright side, no one was accused of child molestation.

At one point during the trial, according to one of the defendants, the Pirate Bay site went down for several hours, and surely to the prosecution’s chagrin, he managed to get it up and running again – while sitting in the courtroom.

On Monday, prosecutor Håkan Roswall called on the judge to send each of the defendants to jail for one year each. Roswall estimated that the site rakes in between five and 10 million Swedish Krona per year – to which defendant Gottfrid Svartholm asked: “Where are my 10 million kronor, please? I want them, where are they?”

On Tuesday, the trial closed after two and a half weeks, with judgement scheduled for April 17th. Meanwhile, both sides headed out to the court of public opinion. Industry group IFPI issued laughable press releases warning that if labels weren’t protected from the likes of the Pirate Bay there would be no new music to pirate anyway. Sure.

At a press conference Tuesday, after closing arguments, one of the defendants stated ”it’s quite obvious which side is the good side.” A conviction, he said, would “be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet.”

Asked what was next, he responded: “I think we’re going to go party.” 

To be continued…

Addendum: Updates from the Pirates at http://trial.thepiratebay.org.