Trial on Swedish file-sharing site Pirate Bay begins with small victory for defendants

The long-awaited trial of Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay kicked off Monday in Stockholm district court amidst a house packed with Pirate supporters, legal and sociological scholars, and much media spectacle. At stake is the more than $14 million in damages being sought by major film and music companies who have accused The Pirate Bay of costing them millions of dollars in lost profits from illegal downloads, as well as fines and up to two years jail time for the company's founders.

At the helm of The Pirate Bay are the site's rebellious founders, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Fredrik Neij, along with the company's financial backer, Carl Lundstrom. And as one of the Web's most popular file-sharing sites, The Pirate Bay founders have a wide and eccentric following behind them - the company was formed based on the ideals of Piratbyrån, a Swedish anti-copyright organization, and now has the backing of a political group called the Pirate Party that was created in the Web site's honor. The number of users is estimated at around 22 million.

Pirate Bay does not host content itself, but indexes files hosted by uses of the peer-to-peer file-sharing tool BitTorrent. Users search the site to find the files they want, and then download them directly from other users' machines.

The trial looks to be a litmus test of sorts for other file-sharing sites under the gun for copyright infringement issues, with big ticket names complaining that ''the operators of the Pirate Bay and others like them are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of millions of copyrighted creative works and files protected under the law.''

For a trial taking place in Sweden and broadcast only in Swedish, one of the remarkable aspects of the case is the interest and involvement of people from around the world. With Swedish media outlets making the audio stream of the trial available, bilingual websites have been translating and summarizing the day's action on the Internet.

Plaintiffs in the case include Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., MGM Pictures Inc., Colombia Pictures Industries Inc., 20th Century Fox Films Co., Sony BMG, Universal and EMI. The case stems from 31 May 2006, when police raided 10 locations in central Sweden, seizing servers and computer equipment and temporarily shutting down the site. Evidence in the case includes witness testimony, e-mails between the suspects and invoices sent to advertisers.

The defendants got a minor victory when the prosecution dropped the most serious charges on only the second day of its trial for assisting widespread copyright infringement.

Pirate Bay co-defendant Fredrik Neij said that prosecutor Håkan Roswall had misunderstood the technology and that his evidence did not implicate the Pirate Bay. The prosecution then had to drop all charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement", leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyrighted content", with Roswall adding that "everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim".