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Half the Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped
eldavojohn writes "Half the charges have been dropped in the second day of the trial against the Pirate Bay. The charges dropped are those relating to 'assisting copyright infringement,' so the remaining charges are simply 'assisting making available.' No information on how this affects the size of the lawsuit or a settlement."
Sorry to piggyback on the FP, but for those of us at work with TFA blocked, here's the BBC's take: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7895026.stm
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
At this stage of the process the prosecutor has to present the evidence he has gathered to the judge; the defence gets time to present rebuttal evidence. When all evidence is presented, it is time for legal interpretation (pleading). It is planned that the judges have all the information they need in three weeks, so that only gives prosecution a few days to bring up new evidence.
And because it is a criminal trial, prosecution can not come back with another case based on the same facts... so dropping the charges now has permanent impact.
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It's a prosecutor.
The record labels do not choose their prosecutors, the state does. Keep in mind, attorneys tend to be type A personalities that seek challenges and glory in inordinate amounts.
I am sure there was some jockeying for the person who will handle this case, someone won, and he is doing it because he knew how to handle the politics moreso than because of his technology background.
It was mentioned yesterday that the prosecutor claimed to be a computer crimes expert, but that he could not get a powerpoint presentation to operate on his laptop.
M
....It's just incredible that the companies that are bringing TPB to court, with all their money and power couldn't find a more technical prepared lawyer (if there is such a thing)
Of course there are technically prepared lawyers! Ye gods man! See my sig
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A classic tactic in self-serving prosecutions is to charge a person with rape, pillage, robbery and illegal parking. Then, when the defendant is found guilty of illegal parking, the prosecutor can announce conviction, with most listeners thinking that the defendant was convicted of all the charges.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The prosecutor dropped half of the charges because he had misunderstood the behaviour of the BitTorrent. The half of the charges were about making pirated copies.
This however still leaves, as the TFA states, the charges about 'assisting in making available'. This also does not affect the claims of the stakeholders, they are still "valid". Also the maximum possible sentence is still the same.
Swedish prosecutor has been really careful with this case and propably doesn't want to risk the case with false charges. All the tracker files provided by stakeholders as the files downloaded are carefully selected. They even have listed every IP met using those .torrent files and made sure that every one of those has a Swedish IP among them. The prosecutor is also careful in using any previous cases against torrent tracker (for example Finnreactor case in Finland).
A Finnish lawyer Mikko Välimäki has made a blog post about the case (Google translation, original is here)
That's not how the Swedish/Scandinavian/German legal system works.
It's a different legal philosophy. The Anglo-American system works essentially by contrasting two alternate realities,
the prosecutor's version of events versus the defendant's version of events, and the trial is a decision between the two.
In this legal system, the prosecution and defendants work towards a sort of common reality. Along the way, arguments and evidence gets dropped until they're left with essentially the minimum of differences. *Then*, at the end, the prosecutor formally demands they be sentenced for whatever they think they can reasonably get.
It's common and completely normal in that way for charges to be changed, dropped or added during the trial. It's what remains at the end that matters, not what they were demanding at the start.
Also, district attorneys in Sweden are not elected officials, and a D.A. career is not viewed as a stepping-stone into a political one. So Swedish prosecutors aren't anywhere near as interested in media attention as American ones are.