Another 15 minutes

In today’s trial against The Pirate Bay there were interrogations of Fredrik Neij and Gottfried Swartholm Warg about their involvement in TPB and other companies related to TPB, the contracts they have written and specifically about the ownerships and founders. They also touched on they subject of the fact that one can use any search engine to find torrent-files, like Google, and also that Google stores torrent-files in their cache. Also, they managed to explain that the actual content (movies) often are created by groups specialized in this task (Warez groups etc) and then releases it on several sites using their tag in the filename, TPB being one of these sites but not necessarily the first.

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On the third day of the trial against The Pirate Bay the organisation IFPI had their say about their claim on about 1.3 million euros, and representative from the movie and gaming industry claims around 400 thousand euros. Not only do they claim money for potential loss of sales they have suffered from all the downloads made from TPB, but also additional compensation for bad-will since there are some advertisement on TPB website with sexual content which they feel becomes associated with the downloaded content. I just think this is ridiculous. First of all, one download from TPB or any other site does not equal a loss of sale for the industry, I think it’s quite the contrary actually. Second, who cares what kind of advertisements there are on a site like that and what does it have to do with the content of the files being downloaded? I hope the lawmen in this trial soon starts to see the flaws in the arguments made by the prosecuting side, if they haven’t already. Let’s see how the trial continues to unfold…

I think that it’s time for the movie industry to find other solutions to this problem. Perhaps start to release movies that people can download for free, but put a couple of minutes of advertisements in the beginning of it and on the website to finance it. I would use a service like that for sure.

The second the of the trial has been around more technical discussions about how actually torrent-files are created and how the tracker works and also mail conversations regarding the income of TPB from advertisements on the site. Some of the jurymen are reported to have trouble staying awake during the prosecutors long talks about his “evidence”. The prosecutor has today dropped half of the charges against The Pirate Bay, specifically the charges about the creation of the actual torrent-files. The only charge that remains now seems to be the one about accessory to distribution/availability, in lack of better translation, of copyrighted material. The defense is celebrating about this huge success in just the second day, and the evidence presented so far cannot be tied to TPBs trackerserver specifically. I think that the evidence presented so far only points out illegal acts made by actual persons downloading content, not by the staff of TPB. To be continued…

The trial against the Swedish torrent-tracker site “The Pirate Bay” began today and you can listen to it live on the web (in Swedish ofcourse). The outcome of this trial will ofcourse be very interesting. Currently it is not illegal in Sweden to have a website linking to copyrighted materials, this has already been tested in a trial with a website linking to mp3-files if I’m not mistaken, allthough it is illegal to actually host copyrighted materials, which TPB is not doing, they are distributing a list of hosts where the file can be located, just like the case with the mp3 site.

The first day of the trial started with the parties going through the charges one by one and the history of TPB to establish the persons prosecuted involvement with TPB; Fredrik Neij, Gottfried Swartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström. The charges are described as providing other people with the possibility to create copies of specific copyrighted materials as well as denying the real copyright holder his/her right to be the only provider of these copies. They are being sued for about 11 million euros. Also a demonstration of the site and how uploading a torrent works were held in the court room today.

I think a probable outcome of this whole trial is that they are convicted but not sentenced to anything but a few thousands in fines or so. But I hope they are found not guilty because under the current legislation they have not commited any crimes in my oppinion. They are just providing a technical service, which is not illegal. It is the responsibility of TPB’s members that provide the actual contents of the site. No matter what happens I think that TPB will continue like it is, any many other sites like it, and this way of distributing files, both legal and illegal, will be more popular than ever.

I also think that the anti-piracy agencies and law enforcement are focusing in the wrong end of the distribution chain. They should target the groups and distributors that actually make money from piracy and not the end-user who occationally download a few movies.

Stay tuned…

I’ve gotten some recommendations of the animated movie Bolt so I decided to see it even though I didn’t have high expectations. It’s a well made movie, but I had problems keeping my concentration throughout the movie, perhaps the plot is not so innovative. It’s good enough on a slow Sunday, and it gets better towards the end, but it doesn’t get any high grade overall from me, it’s average at best.

I saw “the day the earth stood still” today. I’ve heard it’s not a good movie, but I always enjoy alien- and end of the world-movies, those categories always makes a pretty good movie with very few exceptions. I think this movie was interesting and it sort of makes you think about a very possible scenario of what an alien race actually would think about humans. But something is missing, I don’t know what. Perhaps it’s the fact that we (or the Americans rather) are maybe too trigger-happy in the movie than I hope they would be, or the fact that Klaatu (the alien) has some weird power to control machines and computers. But one thing is true in this movie, in order for us humans to change our ways in treating the earth and eachother we need to be on the brink of a global catastrophe, which makes you think because maybe not all catastrophic events can be recovered from. All in all it was a pretty good movie, but not great.

It actually wasn’t so many years ago one was playing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 8-bit gaming console for hours at a time and suffering from a Nintendo-thumb. It’s mindblowing when you think about the progress made since then. When you look at the graphics possible back in the late 1980′s it’s laughable, but very nostalgic for people born in the 1970′s, like me, who used play these games. One game in particular bring back alot of memories for me, “Castle Vania”. It brings back bitter sweet memories of incredible frustration and happy simple times. I found a site some time ago where you can actually play pretty much all those old Nintendo games as they were, right from the web in your browser using Java. Just look at the graphics, hear the sounds, it makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking. But ofcourse it was state of the art back then, ah it makes me smile. Play this game, and many more at www.virtualnes.com, sometimes it’s just fun to look at them again to remember.

Castle Vania, anyone else played this game? I don’t remember it as this ugly, hehe.