Sweden is at centre of the technology world this week, with a major court case happening in Stockholm between some of the world’s largest media companies (Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal), and the world’s largest bit torrent site, The Pirate Bay.

What’s At Issue?
According to torrentfreak.com the charges being put forward can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringement”. Serving bit torrent files on their site since 2003, The Pirate Bay have gathered some 22 million users, however they never host any media on their servers, only torrent links to those sharing files. Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde Carl Lundstroem, are thus pleading not guilty – but if this doesn’t work out for them, face up to two years in prison and 10 million euros worth of fines.

The Pirate Bay describe the trial as being ‘against the largest cultural distribution ever present in history’, and naturally are approaching the event with their their typical flair for public relations. Dubbing the trial a ‘Spectrial’, they’ve parked their touring Pirate Bay bus outside the court, have organised parties ( chip tune guru Goto80 who lived in Melbourne for a year is playing at one of them ), and are sending live twitter feeds from the court house ( and are successfully encouraging big use of the #spectrial tag to create attention ). According to The Swedish Pirate Party, 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”.

Over @ Wired magazine, Ira Rothken, a California lawyer argued that because The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any infringing material, the case against them is going to be difficult:
“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.

Steal This Film 2.5
‘The League of Noble Peers’ earlier released a pair of films exploring the contemporary tensions within file sharing ( stealthisfilm.com ), and although they are currently making a third, based around the current Pirate Bay trial, they’ve just released a trial version 2.5 of their film-in-progress, to help give background for the case, which features the lead-up to the trial and re-enactments of police interviews with The Pirate Bay.

Elsewhere on the Swedish Web
http://swededfilms.com/films.html hosts a range of ‘Sweded films’, a phrase made popular during Michel Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’, referring to homemade versions of famous films ( or in the film plot – in the VHS store the remade tapes are described as having come from Sweden as an excuse for higher rental fees and longer wait times). Sample Sweded films? Karate Kid, Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Case Finishes in Three Weeks Time
Although the prison sentence is a serious outcome the defendants face, the case is unlikely to alter file sharing habits online. As Fred von Lohmann puts it (himself an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney who specializes in copyright law) :

“During Prohibition, you could bust people for running a still, but you were not going to take the alcohol away from the people,” said . “If Pirate Bay goes down, it will be replaced in popularity tomorrow by somebody else.”