Pirate Bay awaits verdict

Nick | 04 Mar 2009, 08:06

With the verdict in the landmark trial of Pirate Bay creators due on April 17th, a Wired editorial suggests that whatever the outcome, the case represented a major blow for the intellectual arguments in support of illegal filesharing.

Pirate Bay is a Swedish-based site that facilitated illegal filesharing. The defendants in the 11-day trial - Frederik Neij, Carl Lundstom, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Warg - are accused of promoting copyright infringement. In creating what the IFPI claimed during the trial was the number one source for illegally downloaded music worldwide, the four had become poster-boys for illegal-filesharers, famous for advocating a copyright-free “Kopimi lifestyle”.

But Wired writes:

“And when Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was confronted with his once-endearing habit of publicly ridiculing copyright owners foolish enough to send a takedown notice to Pirate Bay, you could hear the back-pedaling from across the Atlantic. “They still don’t understand that they have to write to the persons who share the material, not us,“ he said.

“It was a theme that echoed through the defense: Don’t prosecute us, prosecute our 22 million users. They’re the crooks!

“As for Neij’s electrifying 2006 speech? He explained in court that he just read a piece of paper thrust in front of him by the Pirate Bureau, the Swedish open-culture activist party who help start The Pirate Bay five years ago. He didn’t mean it.“