Pirate Bay Trial Ends, Defendants Off To 'Party'
According to various news reports, that was the way Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi left it at a press conference Tuesday, after closing arguments for the defense brought an end to court proceedings.
"It's quite obvious which side is the good side," Kolmsioppi said. Convicting The Pirate Bay, he suggested, would "be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet."
The Pirate Bay site indexes and tracks BitTorrent files and has listed between 22 million and 25 million users since its 2003 debut. It is accused of aiding copyright infringement by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which in the trial has represented major music labels and movie industry heavyweights like Universal, Warner Bros., MGM, EMI, Sony BMG and 20th Century Fox.
Kolmsioppi and his co-defendants, fellow Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij, and an investor, Carl Lundstrom, could face a year in jail and fines of about $135,000 each if convicted.
"I believe that the correct punishment should be one year in prison and that is what I am requesting that the district court hand down in this case," said prosecutor Hakan Roswell during closing arguments, according to BBC News.
"It is important to see organizations representing rights holders from all over the world show their support in the trial of The Pirate Bay," said Ludvig Werner, chairman of the IFPI in Sweden, after the trial ended for the day. "It's particularly encouraging to see support coming from the thousands of small, new and independent creative companies. That's a powerful response to The Pirate Bay, whose propaganda very often misrepresents this as a battle between young and old, and between new and old techniques."
Lawyers for the defense in their closing statements explained how bit torrent file sharing works -- the core of their argument is that Pirate Bay does not host any copyrighted material, and that the site operates legally in every sense.
According TorrentFreak, Neij's lawyer, Jonas Nilsson, argued that The Pirate Bay is open in nature and that the users, not The Pirate Bay's owners and operators, decide what content the service tracks. Therefore, to condemn Pirate Bay would be to condemn any site in the world that could link to copyrighted material. It's the Internet's problem, the defense argued, not Pirate Bay's.