And everybody agrees with the social utility of Google,” he said. “If you’re going to indict a torrent search engine, in essence, what you are doing is indicting Google. Over Wired magazine, Ira Rothken, a California lawyer argued that because The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any infringing material, the case against them is going to be difficult:
Essentially, they are trying to turn the internet into a cable TV network”. “They are fighting tooth-and-nail to bring back the good old days, where there was a hard division into approved senders and passive consumer receivers, where the approved senders would compete for the wallet of the consumers. According to The Swedish Pirate Party, The Pirate Bay “scares” the establishment:
Dubbing the trial a ‘Spectrial’, they’ve parked their touring Pirate Bay bus outside the court, have organised parties ( chip tune guru Goto80 who lived in Melbourne for a year is playing at one of them ), and are sending live twitter feeds from the court house ( and are successfully encouraging big use of the #spectrial tag to create attention ). The Pirate Bay describe the trial as being ‘against the largest cultural distribution ever present in history’, and naturally are approaching the event with their their typical flair for public relations.
Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde Carl Lundstroem, are thus pleading not guilty – but if this doesn’t work out for them, face up to two years in prison and 10 million euros worth of fines. Serving bit torrent files on their site since 2003, The Pirate Bay have gathered some 22 million users, however they never host any media on their servers, only torrent links to those sharing files. Sweden is at centre of the technology world this week, with a major court case happening in Stockholm between some of the world’s largest media companies (Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal), and the world’s largest bit torrent site, The Pirate Bay.Īccording to the charges being put forward can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringementâ€.