February 17th, 2009
Prosecutor drops a charge in Pirate Bay case
Huge win for the Pirate Bay in the Swedish prosecution of the BitTorrent search engine: The prosecutor has dropped one of the major charges against the four men who run the Bay, IT World reports.
Prosecutors dropped a charge for aiding in the copying of copyright works, because they couldn’t prove copies of the content were made. The music industry blustered:
It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works,” [industry lawyer Peter Danowsky] said in a statement.
Ummmm … “making available”? I have no idea what Swedish law says, although I believe European law comports with U.S. Copyright law, which pretty clearly has been interpreted as requiring an actual distribution. Read back on the fate of the “making available” theory here and here and here.
Evidence presented on Tuesday included screenshots showing computers were connected to The Pirate Bay’s tracker, or software that coordinates P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. But a majority of the screenshots show that The Pirate Bay was actually down at the time and that the client connections timed out. The clients, or peers, were still connecting with each other, but through a distributed hash table, another protocol for coordinating downloads unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
