TorrentFreak Wrote:During the afternoon, Peter Sunde sent a message: “How the hell did they think this was going to be something else than EPIC FAIL for the prosecution? Wee’re winning so hard.” Peter points out that the prosecutor is having difficulty working out the difference between megabits and megabytes.

TorrentFreak Wrote:The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström’s lawyer scored points with the already legendary ‘King Kong’ defense.

The third day of the trial started with prosecutor Håkan Roswall who presented his updated/amended charges to the Court, taking into consideration the developments of yesterday (50% charges removed). He characterized these amendments as a “small change”.

The defense lawyers responded saying, “Wee don’t agree that this is just a small adjustment of the claims, but wee’ll return to the matter later.”

According to IFPI’s Peter Danowsky, the damages claimed from The Pirate Bay are the same as if the site had ‘legally’ obtained licenses to distribute the music world-wide, regardless of whether all the downloaders had later decided to buy the music or not. Effectively, they are trying to say that one download=one lost sale. They are talking about imposing the costs of a “global distribution license” on TPB.

For the song “Let it Be” by The Beatles, IFPI is asking for 10 times the damages, since the band’s music isn’t officially available online. Interesting logic here - perhaps if The Beatles music was made officially available, people wouldn’t even need to pirate it. The same 10X multiplier is used for all material ‘made available’ before official release, referring to this charge as a special “preview license.”

Peter Danowsky disputes the claims of the defense that they have no funds and cannot pay damages. He called TPB “organized crime on a grand scale,” which netted “significant revenues.”

“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently 'borrowed' it from me,” Peter Sunde twittered in a reponse.

“Maybe [they are not able to pay] the whole of the claimed damages, but a lot anyway,” said Danowsky. The damages being claimed against the four defendants total 117 million kronor ($13 million).

Sony complained in court that The Pirate Bay never remove torrents on copyright holders request, but that they have the ability to do so since they remove torrents that are named in a way that doesn’t reflect the material they link to. They note that The Pirate Bay has a bad attitude to complaints and ridicules the complainer. Sony says they have suffered many lost sales, suffered damage to their goodwill and other damages to their market.

Henrik Pontén from Svenska Antipiratbyrån (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau) said that their position is very similar to that of the IFPI. Their claim for damages is based on what it would’ve cost for The Pirate Bay to have acquired a global distribution license. This value was doubled to account for an alleged “loss of goodwill”.

Next up, Monique Wadsted for the movie industry. She talked about various alleged infringements, including those on the TV show ‘Prison Break’. Again, she feels that since the infringements took place before an official launch of the media, the damages are calculated based on the cost of a special “global preview license”.

During the second half of the morning session the defense lawyers had the chance to respond. Due to the reduction in the charges, the four defendants say they have no responsibility for the charges that remain.

The lawyers representing all four called on the court for the acquittal of their clients.

Fredrik Neij’s lawyer pointed out that the download figures as reported by the site were far from accurate, and that they should therefore not be used as evidence. It was further argued that uploading a torrent does not mean that the copyrighted files are also ‘available’, since it then has to be seeded. The torrent files, on the other had, are not exclusively on The Pirate Bay, and can also be found through other search engines such as Google.

Gottfrid Svartholm’s lawyer stated that users generate the content on The Pirate Bay, and that his defendant has no control over it. Peter Sunde’s lawyer pointed out that his client was merely the spokesperson of the site, and said that Peter was not responsible for anything else. It was further argued that the correlation between the number of downloads and damages suffered by the copyright holders is non-existent.

As Carl Lundström’s lawyer, Per E Samuelsson took the floor and pointed out the weaknesses in the prosecutor’s case. The defense argued that prosecutors have failed to prove that Lundström has been involved in any transfer of any copyrighted material. He played the King Kong defense.

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” Samuelsson told the court.

“According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia,” the lawyer added.

After the King Kong defense the court decided to adjourn the court case, which will continue tomorrow on day 4. Thus far, the trial is ahead of schedule.

Peter said that after today’s proceedings they all went for some pizza, where they met the whole opposing side. He asked if they could pick up the check. “They refused,” he said.

PSPkiller Wrote:That is an epic beard...

TorrentFreak Wrote:Day 4 of The Pirate Bay trial has seen the focus on Fredrik who was questioned at length. When it was movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted’s turn, she wasted no time in unexpectedly introducing new evidence. Both the defense and the court complained at this point, with Wadsted choosing to shout down the judge.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began the day by again referencing the case in Finland against the administrators of Finreactor. Fredrik’s lawyer Jonas Nilsson requested a copy of the case notes for the defense. It seems comparisons of the two cases will be drawn by the prosecution later in the trial.

Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson continued with his client’s defense, reiterating the weakness of the links between him and the other defendants, and The Pirate Bay operation as a whole. Samuelsson also pointed to Lundström’s email correspondence in 2005 with Gottfrid and Fredrik, where they discussed the possibility of having to move the site to another country. This, he said, was an indication that the defendants kept an eye on the changes in the law and were mindful that they should operate legally within it.

In the meantime, it came to the court’s attention that Tobias Andersson, a future witness in the case, was sitting in the court. He was asked to leave the room, with permission to continue listening on the audio feed next door. He will testify later on.

After a break, the court’s attention switched to Fredrik Neij (TiAMO). The court heard that Fredrik was never a member of Piratbyran and he had no ideological motivation to join TPB. Instead, Fredrik was attracted to the site by the BitTorrent technology. He joined to “..play with The Pirate Bay, just as I wanted,” he said.

The defense said that Fredrik was always mindful of the law and had a desire to operate within it, consulting lawyers to ensure his activities were legal.

In a reference to companies like MediaDefender, Fredrik noted that “anti-p2p companies access our tracker and manipulate our statistics.” He said that although a torrent may have only been uploaded once, these anti-p2p activities inflate the stats on the tracker to indicate that more transfers took place than in reality.

Fredrik was then questioned about his relationship with advertiser Oded Daniel. When the prosecution asked if Oded was involved in the technical aspects of TPB, Fredrik replied.. “No, he’s not good at that. He uses Windows, so…” There was laughter heard on the live audio feed after that remark, not from the court room, but from the listening lounge next door where the bloggers are situated.

Fredrik was asked about the significance of the site’s name, but shrugged and repeated that his interest is merely in the technology.

Fredrik was further questioned by Håkan Roswall, with the Prosecutor pointing out that during his police interview, Fredrik admitted that there may be links to copyright works on TPB. Fredrik said he knew about these due to the legal complaints the site received, noting that the complaints referred only to inapplicable US laws. He went on to deny having received any of these personally, but while he admitted he seen them, he denied creating any of the infamous responses.

Roswall asked Fredrik if he had ever been a seeder on the site. Fredrik admitted to seeding torrents but noted that he only did this with copyright-free material.

When questioned about the situation of some torrents being removed from the site due to bad labeling, the court heard from the defense that TPB site is uncensored, with thousands of new torrents added every day and it is an impossible task to review them all. The tracker is completely open and anyone can and does add to it regularly, completely without any input or correspondence with TPB staff.

Just before lunch, Monique Wadsted for the movie companies took over questioning Fredrik. After a discussion over the way emails are handled at The Pirate Bay, out of the blue she began to introduce new evidence which had not previously been disclosed to the defense, in what is being viewed as an attempt to unsettle Fredrik.

She asked about Fredrik’s connections to other torrent sites, namely OscarTorrents and EurovisionTorrents and he denied being personally connected to them. Noting the breach of protocol, the judge asked if it was acceptable for the court to be considering evidence that was not already presented pre-trial. Monique Wadsted tried to shout down the judge, but that didn’t really help much. The court then took a break.

After the lunch break IFPI’s lawyer Peter Danowsky continued with Fredrik’s questioning. He tried to pin something on him, but Fredrik pointed out that the email he’s referring to is a reply, and that the quotes mean that he didn’t write that part of the email.

Fredrik’s lawyer is next up to ask questions, and the prosecution was educated on the subject of open BitTorrent trackers, BitTorrent swarms and the fact that torrent files can be distributed through means other than the TPB, like email or FTP.

Then the Prosecutor handed over a printed page from TPB and said: “This is a printout from a part of your web page. You call this a screenshot?” Fredrik answered: “This isn’t a screenshot, just a printed page.” Fredrik then explains what’s on the print (a Pink Panther torrent), and how the upload process on TPB works.

Next it’s Gottfrid’s turn to answer questions. The prosecution emphasizes the financial issues, and specifically the link with Oded. When asked if Gottfrid was in charge of ad sales he answered: “No, I tried to get away from that because of time issues. I had a business to run before you came and took it all away.”

The prosecution further questioned Gottfrid about moderation issues, replies to copyright holders and his involvement in developing the site. The prosecutor pushed hard on whether Peter Sunde had worked on the layout and graphics for the site. “To my knowledge, he is neither designer nor graphic artist,” Gottfried replied.

Wadsted later asked Gottfrid how they handle torrents that (allegedly) link to child hershey kisses. He said that in such a case they would inform the police. She then asked if they removed those torrents. He said “some”. “Not all?” was Wadsted’s reply. Gottfrid explained that it is not up to them to investigate crimes, but that they do inform the police. “Wee can’t do investigations of our own. And if the police say wee should remove a torrent, wee will,” he said.

Gottfrid further said that Peter Sunde has nothing to do with technical administration, design, layout, ad sales or any hands-on stuff with the site. He’s just been a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. “Neither me or Neij work well in furnished rooms. Peter was better on the verbal issues and media,” he said.

Around 4 PM the Prosecutor announced that he wanted to bring in additional evidence, some actual torrent files on a diskette (he probably meant CD). The Prosecutor demanded a statement on it at 9 in the morning tomorrow. The defense wasn’t too happy about this, and Gottfrid demanded all torrents instead of four.

This is a developing story, check back for updates

Update:Just a passing thought…..While Wadsted may have thought she was being clever mentioning possible child hershey kisses tracked by The Pirate Bay earlier, it’s not beyond reason that when Gottfrid said that they don’t remove all such torrents, this could be on the instruction of the police - presumably so they can track any offenders. In this situation, the police must understand that Pirate Bay neither committed any offense, nor encouraged it, nor know the people involved. Is there something important here? I guess the court will decide.