The first week of the Pirate Bay trial is over, and it appears to be going well for the pirates. So much so in fact, that they celebrated with champagne.
While the trial is far from finished, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Fredrik Neij, as well as business man Carl Lundström, felt confident enough to throw a party with DJs and free champagne for everyone in attendance.
It seems that their confidence is well founded too, as if having half of the charges dropped wasn’t advantage enough, the Pirate Bay’s defense lawyers are running rings around the prosecution, picking holes in their arguments and exploiting legal loopholes.
The key points of the Pirate Bay defense are that the site itself does not host any pirated material, that all content is generated by users, not the site, and that the quantity of content is so great that it would be impossible to go through it all checking for links to copyrighted material. The defense argued that prosecution has also failed to prove any direct link between the site and the end users, quoting EU directives in what has been dubbed the King Kong Defense.
“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong.
According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.”
The trial resumes on Tuesday.
Source: Gizmodo
Published: Feb 22, 2009 08:35 pm