The Pirate Bay prosecutor altered the copyright-infringement charges Tuesday to make it easier to convict the four defendants who co-founded the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker.
Moments later, Hollywood investigators testified about the ease with which they obtained copyright works using the 5-year-old site. But at the outset of Tuesday’s proceedings, the prosecutor, Håkan Roswall, announced a alteration of the charges, which legal scholars suggested would make it more likely to win a conviction.
The prosecutor removed one sentence from the part of his summons where the purported crimes are described. Until Tuesday, it read:
“The Pirate Bay consists of three sub-components: an index portal in the form of a website with search functionality, a database with related directory containing the torrent files, and a tracker feature. The tracker feature creates a ‘peer-to- peer’ network of users who want to share the same file. All components are necessary for the users of the service to share files between them.”
In the altered version, he removed the concluding sentence starting with “All components.”
Daniel Westman, a legal scholar at “The Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute” at Stockholm University, suggested the prosecutor likely feels uncertain that he can prove all three elements.
“The question is whether the defendants fulfill the requirements in the penal code for complicity in a crime. One could maybe argue that the degree of complicity were higher if all three components could be proven, but the court may as well decide that only one or two is enough,” Westman said.
The crowd at the Pirate Bay trial here was noticeably smaller when the proceedings continued Tuesday after being dark Monday. Last week, there were overflowing hordes of onlookers when the four Pirate Bay defendants took the stand in the trial’s opening days. Apparently in the same clothing as Friday, the defendants sat in the back of the courtroom flanked by their lawyers, while two piracy busters who gathered evidence of illegal file sharing took the witness stand.
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