Owners Of ThePirateBay.org On Criminal Trial

ThePiratebay.org, with an estimated 22 million users, is one of the most visited torrent sites on the Internet.

Torrent sites basically list content that is available for download from other sites.

As you might guess, much of the listed content involves copyrighted material, like Hollywood movies, music videos, songs, software, video games and other protected works.

Sweden brought criminal charges against, 3 defendant’s that administer the site, and one other that helped finance it.

The case stems from May 31, 2006, when police raided ten locations in central Sweden, seizing servers and computer equipment and temporarily shutting down the site.

The owners of the site, were charge with “complicity in the production of copyrighted material” and “assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material”.

Prosecutor Hakan Roswall claims the defendants broke the law by providing the tools to share copyright protected material.

“They have among other things encouraged other people’s copyright infringement,” Roswall said in his opening arguments.

The defendant argued that since no infringing content is located on their servers they should not be liable.

Today, just in the second day of trial,  prosecutors dropped one of the two charges against the defendants, “complicity in the production of copyrighted material”.

“This is a misunderstanding over the technology from the prosecutor’s side. None of the downloads presented in the court can be proved to have been made from The Pirate Bay’s tracker,” Fredrik Neij, one of the four defendants, explained.

“Technically these guys stand a head above police technicians and the prosecutor has not really understood how it works,” Samuelson concurred

“A sensation,” said defense attorney Per Samuelsson, “It is very rare that you win half the case after one and a half days, and it is clear that the prosecutor has been deeply affected by what we said yesterday.”

The four men behind the file-sharing site face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million kronor ($143,529) if convicted.

A civil claim has also been bought against the defendants, by a group of the word’s largest media companies is also being heard.

The plaintiffs, including Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI, seek 120 million kronor ($14.3 million) in compensation for lost revenues.

This is a widely watched and interesting case and we will keep you up to date as the trial proceeds.