In the same week that New Zealand dodged a bullet by postponing the fascistic Copyright Amendment Bill, a court case started in Sweden which could have equally wide implications for file sharing over the internet.

The on-line world is fizzing at the bung as four young pirates take on the world's biggest companies. And, so far, they seem to be doing OK.
Pirate Bay, a website based in Sweden, is the biggest BitTorrent site in the world. It helps users swap music, video, or games files and is being sued by Warner Bros, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Sony to the tune of NZ$28.6million. What makes the case so interesting is the dubious legal framework. What makes it so entertaining is the complete lack of respect the pirates show towards these corporate giants.
For a good laugh online, check out the 'legal threats” page on the Pirate Bay website, where they merrily post and ridicule legal threats from Very Serious Lawyers. Here's a bit of correspondence with Dreamworks:
'This letter is being written to you on behalf of our client, DreamWorks …we request your assistance in the removal of infringements of the Shrek motion picture from this website and any other sites for which you act as an internet Service Provider.”
The pirates responded:
'As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the U.S. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, U.S. law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated. Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in:
a) a suit being filed for harassment.
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.
It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.”
So, just in case you need to ask, what is a BitTorrent? Well it's an internet protocol used by many file-sharing sites that allows distribution of files between computers on the net without a central server. You click on a link and are connected to a computer (somewhere) that has the file. After you finish downloading your computer stays open so others can download from you. When you only have a little bit of the file others can get that bit from you (and vice versa), making the whole sharing process much quicker, with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of computers all linked to share information.
The legal difficulty is that the host site (Pirate Bay in this case) doesn't actually have any of these files, it just points you to who does. It's a tricky line. The Swedish Supreme Court has ruled that this is legal and an attempt by a public prosecutor in Italy last year to block users from accessing Pirate Bay was quickly overturned.
Because if all Pirate Bay helps you do is search for torrents then how does that differ from Google? Google will actually give you more results for a particular movie that you might like to download than Pirate Bay. Just Google search 'Torrents Slumdog Millionaire” and you'll get thousands of hits. Are they the next to go?
Fortunately it seems the pirates are more than capable of defending themselves. Eyes were raised in Stockholm when – after two years of preparation - half the charges were dropped in the first week. Gothenberg's Metro newspaper called it a 'fiasco” while defence lawyer Per E Samuelsson said 'It's as if half the prosecution case has gone up in smoke.”
He says in order for his client to be responsible, 'the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the administrators of the Pirate Bay don't initiate transfers. It's the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. If content owners want to go after infringers, they are free to do so, but that means going after individuals.” he said.
Pirate Bay estimates about 22 million people use its site, about a third of them in China. That's going to make individual prosecution a little tricky…
Meanwhile, the pirates have become veritable internet heroes, arriving at court in a campaign-style tour bus and, as the first week of the trial came to an end, holding a 'Spectrial Kopimi Party” at a night club in central Stockholm for hundreds of supporters with live performances and video art made from movies featured in the trial.
watusi@thesun.co.nz