Case Against The Pirate Bay Delayed Once Again, Possibly Until 2009

Court spokesperson claims large number of busy lawyers involved are having difficult time agreeing on a court date for copyright infringement trial against the BitTorrent tracker site.

It was back in January of this year that The Pirate Bay was first charged by Swedish public prosecutor Public Hakan Roswall with accessory and conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law. The charges include some 33 cases of alleged copyright infringement (20 music albums, 9 movies, and 4 computer games). He demands that The Pirate Bay pay damages of 1.2 million kronor ($185,000 USD) to the Swedish state and that the computers of the site's admin be confiscated.

Along the way the case has been delayed several times, one instance of which was related to the fact that Jim Keyzer, the Chief police investigator in the preliminary investigation against The Pirate Bay, and a key witness in the trial against the famed BitTorrent tracker site, had been an employee of Warner Bros. during the entire affair! Roswall later concluded that he would not investigate Keyzer's connections to Warner Bros. even though he was employed by them during the ENTIRE INVESTIGATION that he is expected to testify about the findings of.

According to a court spokesperson, this latest delay is apparently due to a number of reasons.

“It has taken an extremely long time. It took time to inform the suspects, the last one as late as May. Then the claims from the plaintiffs had to come in,” said Anita Thimberg, an administrator with the Stockholm District Court, to the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

The latest wrinkle is that several of the lawyers working on the case have extremely busy schedules, as do several of the representatives for the plaintiffs in the case, making it difficult to find a date to start the trial. It may even be postponed until 2009.

The real dilemma for Swedish prosecutors has always been how to stop the BitTorrent tracker site, for as the people behind The Pirate Bay have repeatedly pointed out, they don't actually host any copyrighted content, but merely the torrent tracker files which visitors use to share content with one another.

This is why it seems that Swedish prosecutors have decided to take the "accessory" approach for current copyright laws in that country prevent any other legal approach.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com