Day #4 of The Pirate Bay ‘Spectrial’ – Accused of ‘Purposeful Crime on Grand Scale’

“This is about a purposeful crime on a grand scale with significant income as a result”, claims legal counsels for the music and film companies today in the case against the BitTorrent tracker site.

Day #4 of the ‘Spectrial’ against The Pirate Bay continued yesterday with Prosecutor Håkan Roswall citing a Finnish against the Finreactor BitTorrent tracker site for apparent use later in the case.

Per E Samuelsson, defense lawyer for Carl Lundström’s, then presented e-mail correspondence with the other defendants and he discussing wanting to try and find a country (non-EU) where to relocate the site due to changes in Swedish Law based on a new EU directive. Was asked to investigate if Argentina would be an option.

It’s also noted that The Pirate Bay is totally uncensored, combing over 1000 index requests each day which is impossible to manually review.

“The Pirate Bay grew organically organic without us doing anything,” said Frederik Neij: when asked about the site’s conception. “It grew dynamically. It spread word of mouth. Chose the TPB because it was a good name and good logo.”

When asked if he knew the site contained any copyright material he said only that “there’s a possibility that it does.”

Neij later noted that in the prosecution’s proof that nobody can tell from where the seeder downloaded the torrent file from and that many of the torrent files uploaded on TPB are also available on other BitTorrent tracker sites like Mininova, ISOHunt, etc..

Monique Wadsted, an attorney for the film companies suing Pirate Bay’s founders, then introduced new evidence when questioning Neij that left the defense rattled. She asked about his connections to other torrent sites such as OscarTorrents and EurovisionTorrents. Neij denied any affiliation with them, but the judge interrupted the proceedings and asked whether her line of questioning was acceptable, since the evidence hadn’t been presented pre-trial. Ms. Wadsted tried to argue with the judge, but the court decided to take a break.

Legal counsels for the music and film companies then later outlined their compensation claims against the The Pirate Bay.

“The business that The Pirate Bay was undertaking led to an extensive injury and an extensive loss of sales and marketing ability,” said Peter Danowsky, another of the entertainment industry lawyers. “The investigation had found that the defendants were contributing to making available copyrighted works for download, and that was the basis for the compensation claim of the music companies.

Danowsky said the activities of The Pirate Bay affected the music companies’ legitimate sales of CDs and online recordings, as well as the potential to develop new online sales.

The music companies are claiming compensation of 2.1 million euros ($2.7 million USD), based on a sample of 23 tracks selected by the prosecutor. “But the real loss is greater than that”, Danowsky said. The Pirate Bay had created an “unassailable competitor” which led to reduced possibilities for online music sales and new digital music services.

It argues that many recordings had been made available for download before their legitimate release, further compounding the damage to the music companies.

“This is about a purposeful crime on a grand scale with significant income as a result”, Danowsky said. He dismissed claims by the defendants that they would be unable to pay the damages, pointing to the fact that The Pirate Bay website was continuing to display adverts after the police raid of May 2006.

So in other words, the entertainment industry is arguing that The Pirate Bay should be closed because they can’t compete against free. It’s a bogus argument. Take a look at iTunes.

As an interesting sidenote, TPB founders apparently ran into the prosecutors in the case at a pizza joint afterwards.

“We had some pizza after today’s episode of #spectrial,” Brokep wrote on Twitter. “Met the whole opposing side and asked if they could pick up the check. They refused “

Stay tuned….

Further reading:

Day 3
Day 2
Day 1

NOTE: The trial is being covered via twitter HERE as it occurs, with the legend for abbreviations HERE. You can also watch a quick video recap in English HERE.

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