Another 15 minutes

I have noticed from the huge peak of visitors to my blog yesterday to my entry on Swedish Crownprincess Victoria’s engagement to Daniel Westling that there is a massive interest around the world about their wedding, so I’ll post some of my own photos from the event and links to the broadcasts of the ceremony, concerts, dinner and party. continue reading…

I’ve found myself looking alot at Michael Jackson material on the web since his recent early passing. I am not such as big fan of his really, but I can appreciate his genius. I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite songs from him, “give in to me”. Other favorites being “Billie Jean” ofcourse and “Dirty Diana”. R.I.P.

A few minutes ago the verdict of the trial against The Pirate Bay was announced by the court. The outcome in this instance is that all four involved are convicted to one year in prison and around 3 million euros in fines, which is a record in Sweden. This is somewhat surprising to me, and I will have to read the courts descision in more detail later to see how they have come to this conclusion. My guess is that the fact that they have made money of the site from advertisements did not work in their favor. But then again, the descision of this court is not the end of this story by a long shot. It will be overruled atleast will probably be atleast two more trials, and its only the ruling of the supreme court that will stand, a process that will take about 5 years.

Today the defense had their closing arguments in the trial against The Pirate Bay and they pointed out that Swedish law requires alot more for anyone being convicted of assisting in a crime than what is the case with TPB, this is supported both in other Swedish trials and in EU directives. To be convicted of assisting in a crime in Sweden there must be an active participation, one cannot be convicted of assisting in this type of crime by simply doing nothing about the illegal files being transferred through the TPB website. The trial is about to end soon and it will be very interesting to see what the outcome will be in this instance, either way it’s highly likely that the verdict will be appealed. I still have hopes though, but it could go either way I think.

Today the closing arguments began in the trial against The Pirate Bay. The prosecutor went through all the evidence and said that there is not doubt that the accused are all involved in TPB which is indeed profiting from its business, and is arguing for a verdict of one year in prison. The claim that TPB has made atleast 1 million euros in profit over 5 years seems highly unlikely though, but he is settling for about 100,000 euros based on the actual invoices the accused has agreed to. He made some good arguments and conclusion and referring to other cases like this in the past and also from current legislation about assisting in a crime. Tomorrow I believe is the closing arguments for the defense, and then there might be some time, maybe days or weeks, until we get a verdict (that is unless the court wants to advise the European Union Court). This is very interesting for many people… I think much is depending now on the final closing arguments of the defense.

Today more witnesses for the defense was heard and finally someone who could explain how the technology works, Kristoffer Schollin. In particular that even though a torrent-file is uploaded to the The Pirate Bay website it doesn’t mean that TPB tracker is being used, and also that the amount of completed downloads reported on the website could be downloads completed using any tracker, not only TPB, as a torrent can have many trackers listed when it was first created and the same torrent can be used on many different trackers at the same time.

Also professor Roger Wallis, with an impressive CV, presented his view and research that the link between falling sales figures of the CD industry cannot be blaimed on file sharing technology and illegal copying. He also started by pointing out that Henrik Pontén of the anti-piracy agency had been calling to the university and his collegues asking if was indeed a real professor and questioning his work, something that was very upsetting and Wallis said he considered pressing charges against Pontén.

I think today was a very good day in court and it seemed like many got a much more clear view on how everything actually works with BitTorrent and TPB, and hopefully it is now much easier to come to the conclusion that TPB has very little to do with the actual illegal file-sharing process.

The questioning of witnesses continued on wednesday, day seven of the trial against The Pirate Bay. We heard John Kennedy of IFPI answer questions, translated by some Omar who did a piss-poor job (!), about the negative financial impact on the music industry by sites such as TPB, and that the compensation claims are justified and even conservative. He claims that there are research papers available that suggests that people who do not get the music for free would then buy it and that piracy is to blaim for the falling sales figures in the music industry, a statement which I totally do not agree with. I don’t know anyone who would buy the CDs they have downloaded from the web if they hadn’t found it for free. Also I think it’s common that you download a CD or song and then buy the album because you like it and want to support the smaller artists, a behaviour which benefits less known artists on the expense of the world famous artists who already swim in money.

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