Court Ahoy!

Threat Level at WIRED gives the skinny on the hoopla in Sweden over P2P file sharing, and don't think it won't have implications worldwide:

The much-anticipated criminal trial of The Pirate Bay's operators begins in a Stockholm criminal court today. The men behind of the notorious BitTorrent tracking service known for pointing the way to pirated software, games, music and movies are accused of contributory copyright infringement and face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000. The defendants are Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström. Prosecutor Hakan Roswall has summarized the charges as "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws."

The trial is expected to be closely followed by law enforcement agencies, internet surfers, Hollywood and others. Among other things, it represents the first prosecution of its kind in Sweden, a country once thought of as a bastion of the liberal laws that gave rise to The Pirate Bay five years ago.

"The operators of The Pirate Bay have exploited the creative efforts of others for years by enabling the illegal distribution of audio-visual and other creative works on a vast scale while making a profit for themselves," the Motion Picture Association said in a statement. The association, the international counterpart to the Motion Picture Association of America, added: "It is important that the people responsible for operating The Pirate Bay are dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement authorities in Sweden."

In the United States, eight torrent-tracker administrators and content pirates have pleaded guilty to or have been convicted in an investigation that began in 2005 dubbed Operation D-Elite. But such prosecutions are rare, and usually focus on defendants who specialize in pre-released material. The majority of copyright enforcement in the United States is handled in civil lawsuits brought by copyright owners, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the anti-copyright Pirate Party, told The Local, an English-language Swedish news site, that The Pirate Bay "scares" the establishment. "They are fighting tooth-and-nail to bring back the good old days, where there was a hard division into approved senders and passive consumer receivers, where the approved senders would compete for the wallet of the consumers. Essentially, they are trying to turn the internet into a cable TV network," he said.

The Pirate Bay does not directly host copyrighted content. Instead, like other trackers, it hosts torrent files that point to where chunks of the music, movies or software lives on uploaders' computers. The torrent files, in essence, act as a locator allowing The Pirate Bay's more than 22 million users to find the content they're after. "That means no copyrighted and or illegal materials are stored by us," The Pirate Bay administrators have argued on their website. "It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker."

Ira Rothken, the California lawyer who is appealing an $111 million civil judgment a U.S. judge levied last year on U.S.-based tracker TorrentSpy, agreed, and said individuals who are supplying the unauthorized content, not the admins of The Pirate Bay, are the ones the authorities should be going after. "The Pirate Bay is not a pirate site. No copyrighted works are touching it in any way," he said. "Ultimately, if you want to look to getting any kind of pragmatic remedy, they would need to go after those who the copyright holder believes is actually hosting the infringing content or who is the source of the infringing content." He suggested Google is more liable for infringement than The Pirate Bay. That search engine provides millions of direct links to unauthorized copyrighted works, he said. "If you're going to indict a torrent search engine, in essence, what you are doing is indicting Google. And everybody agrees with the social utility of Google," he said.

All the while, the public's thirst for pirated material is unquenchable. Movie studios, record labels and software and videogame makers claim they lose billions each year to piracy. A year ago, The Pirate Bay had eight million users. Now it claims more than 22 million. Worldwide, there's countless numbers of tracking services similar to The Pirate Bay. The sites can make money by selling advertising. The Pirate Bay operators say their servers are located outside of Sweden and are therefore out of the government's reach. They maintain that, whatever the outcome of the trial, The Pirate Bay will continue online.

True or not, it likely doesn't matter. "During Prohibition, you could bust people for running a still, but you were not going to take the alcohol away from the people," said Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney who specializes in copyright law. "If Pirate Bay goes down, it will be replaced in popularity tomorrow by somebody else."

My take? The Fifth Amendment?