David M Williams
Sunday, 22 February 2009 07:41
Business IT -
Networking
Page 3 of 4
Samuelsson claimed the prosecutors have failed to prove Lundström has been involved in any transfer of any copyrighted material. Specifically, he said (in Swedish) “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 concept illustrated is that Lundström – and, one presumes, the other defendants – have no idea who uploaded what, and that at no time has he had any connection. “Has Carl Lundström encouraged King Kong in the jungles of Cambodia to commit a crime?” Samuelsson asked.
The defence has thus challenged the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the people behind the Pirate Boy actually and actively assisted others to commit a crime, and that they ought to be held collectively responsible for a crime committed by those who are actual identifiable individuals that upload the copyrighted material called, for example, King Kong.
To support this Lundström cited EU directive 2000/31/EG from June 8th 2008 – which is incorporated into Swedish Law – which makes it clear that service providers are not responsible for the content of information passing through the site and that one cannot reasonably expect service providers to be aware of these contents.
On day four, attention switched to Fredrik Neij who claimed solely technical interest in torrent technology and absolutely no interest in the material being transferred. If yesterday was the “King Kong defence” it seemed day four was the “
I don’t know anything about that” defence.
Neij was questioned over the site’s name (ie “Pirate Bay”) to which he shrugged and repeated his interest was solely in the technology.
Neij was asked if he knew about links to copyright works and he conceded he was aware due to legal complaints the site received, but noted the complaints always referred purely to inapplicable U.S. laws. He claimed he had not personally received any of these nor that he created any of the infamous responses to which I referred earlier.
Neij explained how the site is uncensored and due to its volume of traffic new torrents cannot be personally reviewed. The tracker is open and anyone can, and does, add to it without any input or correspondence with the Pirate Bay staff, repeating the earlier argument by Lundström.
The prosecution questioned Neij about an alleged connection to other torrent sites (which he denied connection to) but, in yet another blow, the judge ruled this material out of order because it was new evidence that was not previously presented pre-trial.
The prosecution next sought to determine the official structure of the Pirate Bay in terms of roles, duties, positions and other business-like elements.
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