Politics and Law

Sweden's Pirate Party has won entry to the European Parliament in Brussels in elections held Sunday.

The Pirate Party gained 7 percent of the Swedish votes and secured at least one of the 18 seats that Sweden holds in the parliament.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate Party

(Credit: Carl Johan Rehbinder)

"Citizens have understood that it's time to pull the fist out of the pocket and that you can make a difference," Rick Falkvinge, leader and founder of the party, told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, after the result of the elections were revealed. "We don't accept to be bugged by the government. People start to understand that the government is not always good."

The Pirate Party is focused on three main goals: "to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected."

The party was founded in 2006, and that year gained only 0.63 percent of the votes in Swedish parliamentary elections. But since then it has attracted members during the debate on several controversial laws that authorize monitoring of electronic communications and that make it easier to police file sharing on the Internet.

It is now Sweden's third biggest party by membership. Its ranks swelled when four men were sentenced to prison in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in April. People use Web sites like The Pirate Bay to transfer movies and music, a practice that has drawn the ire--and the lawyers--of Hollywood studios and the recording industry.

The Pirate Party is not formally connected with The Pirate Bay, but has officially expressed support for the Web site.

The party wants all noncommercial copying to be free and file sharing to be encouraged. The copyright system, it argues, is out of whack--rather than encouraging the spread of culture, the system now imposes severe restrictions.

The European elections attracted 43.8 percent of the Swedish voters, which is on par with the European average.

Apart from the Pirate Party, which became the fifth biggest party in the elections in Sweden, the Greens were the big winners gaining 10.9 percent resulting in a fourth position and two seats in the parliament.

The search for unbiased judges in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in Sweden seems never-ending.

Finding legal authorities who are not connected to the people involved in the case is apparently difficult in a country that counts only 9 million inhabitants.

Shortly after the verdict was delivered in mid-April, sentencing the four defendants to jail for one year for having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files available for distribution, Judge Tomas Norström was accused of having a conflict of interest.

The accusations were based on his membership in organizations such as the Swedish Copyright Association, which counts among its members: Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted. All three are lawyers who represented the plaintiffs during the Pirate Bay trial.

Conflict-of-interest accusations were filed by all the four defendants, together with their appeal of the verdict to the High Court of Justice.

Court President Fredrik Wersäll appointed Judge Ulrika Ihrfeldt to investigate the conflict of interest. But shortly afterward, Ihrfeldt revealed that she also had been a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and was removed from the case.

Wersäll then moved the conflict-of-interest investigation to another part of the court system not involved in the main appeal of the verdict.

Judge Anders Eka was appointed to lead the investigation. But the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revealed this week that Eka is connected to the Stockholm Center for Commercial Law, a research center at Stockholm University, where lawyers Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky also are involved.

Eka told the Dagens Nyheter that he is not a personal friend of the plaintiffs' lawyers and that he has no background in copyright law. Still, he acknowledges that an investigation of him for potential bias could be possible.

Wersäll told the national news agency TT that the investigation of Norström's potential conflict of interest is a high priority and should be finished within a few weeks.

If Norström is found biased, the case will be sent back to the district court. Otherwise, the High Court of Justice will look at the main appeal of the verdict and possibly decide to hold a new trial.

A few days ago, four record companies involved in the case--Universal Music, EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music--solicited the district court to order the defendants and their Internet provider to stop operating Thepiratebay.org, Swedish media reports.

The Web site has been essentially unaffected by the verdict. The four record companies have verified that the site is still helping distribute copyright-protected files and asks the district court to order its closure and impose a fine if it is not closed.

Defense attorneys representing the operators of the Pirate Bay made their final case Tuesday for the legitimacy of the site, as the Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm came to a close.

Prosecutors have accused the defendants of making available copyrighted material in violation of the law, and in their closing arguments on Monday, said each of the four defendants should be sentenced to a year in prison, according to news reports.

Defendants Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi, and Carl Lundstorm have argued that Pirate Bay does not host infringing content on its servers, but merely acts as a search engine for visitors searching for content--such as Hollywood movies or commercial software--available via the BitTorrent protocol.

"It is a completely legal technology that is offered by The Pirate Bay," Jonas Nilsson, the defense attorney for Neij, said on Tuesday, according to Swedish news site The Local. "It is an open site where users themselves upload content... Bit torrent technology can be used for both legal and illegal means on Pirate Bay in the same way as by Google or MySpace."

Prosecutors during the trial have claimed that the majority of the material available on The Pirate Bay is copyrighted and have argued that every MP3 file swapped online amounts to a lost record sale.

"There is certainly a lot of copyrighted material, but this is an Internet problem, not a Pirate Bay problem," Nilsson said Tuesday.

Peter Danowsky, representing the International Federation of Phonographic Industries on Monday, said it was irrelevant that torrent files could be found using other sites like Google, The Local reported.

"To say that 'so many others also commit the same crime and therefore we shouldn't be convicted' doesn't hold, and that's something to which courts never give any consideration," he said.

The court is also hearing a civil claim from Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI.

A verdict is expected to be announced within a few weeks, according to news reports.

One of the most difficult tasks for companies that sell copyrighted music, movies, or computer software is estimating how much money they lose due to piracy. So they have been known to--how to put this delicately?--exaggerate.

That's the topic that The Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm explored on Wednesday when John Kennedy, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, testified that every MP3 file that is swapped online represents a lost sale. The IFPI is the Recording Industry Association of America's international affiliate.

Kennedy answered "Yes" to Pirate Bay defense attorneys when asked whether that was true, to peals of laughter from less-than-sympathetic spectators, according to news reports.

In the trial that started last week, prosecutors have accused the defendants, who have insisted that their Web site is legal under Swedish law, of making available copyrighted material in violation of the law.

Defendants Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi, and Carl Lundstorm have argued that no infringing content is located on their servers. Instead, they claim that The Pirate Bay acts as a search engine that points visitors to files--many of which are Hollywood films, music videos, and commercial software--available through the BitTorrent protocol.

IFPI said in a statement Wednesday that, in the post-Grokster and post-Kazaa era, The Pirate Bay became the world's most popular font of copyright-infringing music files. "If you lost 1,000 sales in week one, your recording, instead of going into the charts at No. 5, would go in at No. 20. If you aimed at No. 10--which is good for a new artist--you could fall to No. 75 and if you had aimed at No. 20 you may not make the chart at all," Kennedy said, adding that CD sales fell 38 percent from 2001 to 2007.

Kennedy called the damage requests from the music companies--2.1 million euros, or about $2.67 million--"justified and maybe even conservative because the damage is immense."

The music industry's statistics have been called into question before: a 2006 government report obtained by The Australian says copyright owners "failed to explain" how they reached such dire conclusions. A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that losses due to counterfeiting and piracy are much lower than estimated by business groups. (In a related industry, The Economist has assailed software piracy statistics.)

"I want Pirate Bay to close down," Kennedy told the Associated Press after his testimony. "I want some compensation and I want it to be clear people cannot steal other people's property without there being consequences."

Also testifying on Wednesday, according to Swedish news site The Local, was Ludvig Werner, head of the Swedish chapter of IFPI. Pirate Bay attorney Jonas Nilsson pressed him on whether or not the group had done an analysis of copyright infringement and lost revenue for specific songs (it hadn't).

A day earlier, prosecutors adjusted the language of the indictment, according to The Local. This language was removed: "All components are necessary for users of the service are able to share files with one another." And the phrase "provide the ability to others to upload torrent files to the service" was changed to "provide the ability to others to upload and store torrent files to the service."

A civil claim brought by large content holders--Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI--is also being heard with the Swedish government's criminal prosecution.

On the first day of the long-awaited criminal trial involving The Pirate Bay file-sharing site, Swedish prosecutors unexpectedly dropped half of the charges against the site's operators.

Prosecutors previously accused the defendants, who have insisted that their Web site is legal under Swedish law, of assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material. The amended charges focus on the act of making the material available.

This represents a preliminary win for defendants Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi, and Carl Lundstorm, who have argued that no infringing content is located on their servers. Instead, The Pirate Bay acts as a search engine that points visitors to files--many of which are Hollywood films, music videos, and commercial software--available through the BitTorrent protocol.

"A sensation," said defense attorney Per Samuelsson, according to The Local news site in Sweden. "It is very rare that you win half the case after one and a half days, and it is clear that the prosecutor has been deeply affected by what we said yesterday."

The four men behind the file-sharing site face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million kronor ($143,529) if convicted. A civil claim brought by a group of the word's largest media companies is also being heard with the prosecution. The plaintiffs--Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI--seek 120 million kronor ($14.3 million) in compensation for lost revenues.

The IFPI association that represents the recording industry (the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) said in a statement that the dismissed charges will have little effect.

Peter Danowsky, legal counsel for the music companies, said: "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."

For the rest of the first day of the trial, prosecutor Håkan Roswall described how Internet e-mail works and offered details about the computer hardware seized in a 2006 raid, according to TorrentFreak.com. The trial resumes on Wednesday, with the defense attorneys having a chance to respond on Thursday.