Another 15 minutes

Today it was announced that the Swedish crown princess Victoria and her boyfriend of seven years, Daniel Westling, are now officially engaged to be married. King Carl XVI Gustaf has given his blessing and requested the Swedish government to do the same. The royal family announced the news on national television earlier today and later the happy couple held a press-conference where they described how Westling kneeled and proposed to the crown princess at the castle of Drottningholm on a beautiful sunny winter day and Victoria said “yes, yes, yes”. This is also a very happy day for many people in Sweden and a welcome break from the unfortunate financial news. The wedding is planned to take place in the spring of year 2010, but no exact date is decided yet.

Daniel Westling is a gym owner and entrepreneur and used to be personal trainer and close friend the crown princess. Westling is not of noble birth, but rather a man of the people, which is good or bad depending on who you ask. He has been struggling alot with being accepted by the royal family as well as the people of Sweden, but he says he will try his best to earn the trust of everyone.

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Today the defense got the opportunity to question some people that are the ones that collected the evidence (Antipiratbyrån, “anti-piracy agency”) of The Pirate Bay by downloading files from TPB site. To me it seemed like neither the witnesses nor the defense attorney had very high technical knowledge about the BitTorrent-techonology, and there were alot confusion about whether they were talking about the client software, the TPB website, the torrent-file or the actual data content sometimes.

The prosecution talked alot about what evidence were collected by the anti-piracy agency and how easy it is to download from The Pirate Bay website.

But I think the defense successfully pointed out that from the evidence presented in this trial one cannot see if the torrent-tracker being used is actually TPB or some other site (by other users/peers), and also that there were no attempts to contact the original torrent uploader nor the seeders of the file in question. They also pointed out that the torrent-client is not provided by TPB and that there is no way of telling how many copies have been made of the file before it reaches The Pirate Bay. Some good points were made by the defense, even though the attorney seemed abit lost with the technical terms (to my surprise), but even more so the witness :).

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The fifth day of the trial against The Pirate Bay continued with questioning of Peter Sunde about his involvement with the website and companies handling the advertisements on TPB and Carl Lundström about his financial help of TPB. There were alot of irritation and the defense protested against the trial becoming very American when the prosecution introduced evidence that were not known by the defense, some YouTube-clips and also mail conversations and blog entries which did not take place in the time frame within this trial. Peter Sunde wanted an answer from advocate Peter Danowsky if this was supposed to be a political trial and that he didn’t feel it was appropriate for questions about his political views, but was refused an answer.

I think it’s annoying that they talk so much about their personal businesses, finances, whether or not they make money of the site. Which in my oppinion has nothing to do whether or not the website is illegal or not, which should be the main issue here. The website is not less legal just depending on the organisation structure of TPB, what personal business they are involved with or what political views they have. I hope there will be more discussions in court soon about the actual legislation regarding the technical solutions used.

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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…