Showbiz drags The Pirate Bay operators to court.
Operators of The Pirate Bay are back in the legal spotlight, this time because the showbiz has dragged them to court for “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.” They have just pleaded innocent in the case, which is expected to take several weeks.
Aside from requesting their computers be confiscated, according to The Associated Press, the prosecutor is calling for the operators to cough up 120 million kronor (almost AU$22 million). They could also face up to two years in prison if found guilty. Warner Bros., MGM Pictures, Colombia Pictures, Fox, Sony, Universal, and EMI are all plaintiffs on the case.
As expected, the confident website owners believe the case doesn’t stand a chance under current Swedish law. “What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again,” declares Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, in a press conference.
Their confidence hinges on how the BitTorrent-tracking website doesn’t host or even see any of the data that users share. Due to the way the peer-to-peer protocol works, it just points people in the right direction. “NONE of the copyrighted data in question is published or ever stored on our servers,” writes a legal representative for The Pirate Bay in response to one of the many unfulfilled take-down notices. “Nor is any of the copyrighted data relayed through our servers. The tracker merely provides .torrent files.”
“As to this day this activity is not prohibited by Swedish law,” it continues, adding its “activities will therefore continue until this fact changes or Hell freezes over.” The site’s legal page words the current take-down status just as blankly, saying “0 torrents has [sic] been removed, and 0 torrents will ever be removed.”
No stranger to controversy, this certainly isn’t the first instance where the media powers that be have tried to take down the popular file-sharing website. In May 2006, it was taken down for several days due to a police raid on ten separate locations in Sweden, confiscating its servers. The website now has servers located in various other countries.
It’s an interesting case to watch and you can follow it, for the most part, through its slightly kooky trial website. If The Pirate Bay actually loses, search engines could suddenly be liable for linking to infringing material, rather than simply those who made it available in the first place.
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