Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday

Anonymous Pirate writes "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. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."

Comments

News in english about the trial:

[Alsn]

http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ Is the "official"(if there is such a thing) blog about the trial.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[aliquis]

MPAA asked for 15.4 million $ earlier, don't know if that's still the number. The swedish lawyer was on TV this morning but I don't remember what she said.

When asked if it wasn't like supplying crowbars she said that the swedish limits for accessory was low and mentioned a battering where one guy had hold the other guys jacket while it was going on he was condemned for accessory assault (or whatever the english word would be.)

They also asked what would happen if TPB wasn't condemn for anything, and what would happen to the copyright and so on then, but she hadn't thought about that and it didn't existed in her mind ...

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a Swedish precedence regarding BBS style forums where copyrighted material was uploaded. The host of the BBS was acquitted, and this is what TPB has been leaning on so far.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[MoellerPlesset2]

I thought that they had long ago tested the laws (and won) on whether the site was legal and how they couldn't end up in the slammer for this?

Yes, since they haven't actually distributed any copyrighted material themselves, it makes it pretty unclear in terms of the Swedish laws.
It's worth noting that they were operating for years without any action, because the prosecutors were skeptical. The reason they got raided and subsequently prosecuted was due to political pressure coming from the Minister of Justice, who in turn was being pressured by the US government. The Pirate Bay raid led to a political scandal, since Sweden has a separation of powers between the cabinet and executive branch. IOW: A minister cannot tell his department what to do directly. While Minister Bodström wasn't found to have broken the law, it may have been a contributing factor in his party losing the election later that year.

While I'm optimistic about their chances, there are some complicating factors that make it an interesting case. For one thing, they have advertising on the site and have made money off it. Since for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden, it's a question of whether they're indirectly contributing to that crime, and are therefore accessories. I believe that's the prosecution's argument, anyway.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[advocate_one]

Bzzzt wrong... when the MP3 craze kicked off, the labels were ridiculously slow off the mark providing content in the new format... if you wanted it, then you had no choice but to rip it off a CD... then when they did start providing MP3s, they weren't proper MP3s, but proprietary DRM'd low quality crap and they were still charging the full price for what was effectively low quality crapola... so people who wanted to listen without offending their ears at the horrible encoding artifacts you get from low bitrate rips, were still forced to rip their own CDs to get quality...
MP3 sharing only really took off when dialup rates improved or people got network access on college campuses...

Political trial

[castrox]

This trial is guaranteed to be unfair even from the start. The EU has released the so called Medina report, already judging the defendants as guilty. The report was issued several weeks ago. This way the judges already know how to judge these individuals, so things are kept simple!

I guess this trial will mean that linking to copyright infringing material will be illegal. Possibly they will make it so it will be illegal if there's an intent which of course will be all the battle.

It's time to vote for the Pirate Party.

More info:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MedinaOrtega_INI-report-Copyright_JURI-consolidated
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/copyright-dogmatism-ridiculously-strikes-european-parliament

Greetings from a sad Swede

Re:Geez...

[meringuoid]

There isn't piracy because there's DRM, there's DRM because there's piracy.

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