Article over at The Times online.

Interesting developments in the BREIN vs. The Pirate Bay case,  see brokep’s blogpost. It looks like they faked evidence (download PDF) in order to connect Fredrik Neij to Reservella, the company owning The Pirate Bay since a couple of years, in order to direct all the costs and fees to the three protagonists in the #spectrial. (Update: New info on brokep’s blog, documents on Wikileaks now.)

In short, simple whois information might be used to fake the credentials and the company who provided the credit report (Experian) ‘can’t find a copy’. The irony is crushing.

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay ’s ISP uplink was taken offline by the Swedish authorities due to the pending (!) trial against the original founders. Related services like Openbittorrent, which was hosted on the same fiber, went down too. The court order can be found on the website of Piratpartiet here (in swedish).

3 hours later, the site is came back online at a new IP: 194.71.107.15. Currently, there are fiber issues (unrelated to the legal action), so it is down again. TPB tracker and Openbittorrent tracker are down until further notice. Switch to another public tracker like PublicBT, but try to avoid overload: enable DHT and Peer Exchange in your clients.

In a few days The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist. You can expect a more in-depth article on the sale later on, but I want to focus on a clear and present issue at hand: when the new owners flick the tracker switch, millions of torrents will be crippled or killed. (bar DHT and similar techniques for dramatic cue !)

What could have been done? What can we do now? What can we do to prevent this in the future? Somebody, please think of the trackers!

It sure looks like the trial on The Pirate Bay will have to be redone. While the verdict still isn’t final until the appeals have either been accepted or rejected, copyright lobbies are using it as pressure material to shut down smaller trackers and filesharing communities in Sweden and elsewhere.

Most of the international press seems to accept this verdict as final, and that bothers me a bit. They forget that the first round of this high-profile case (which belongs in the High Court anyway) was fought in a local court, bearing the judgemental equivalent of an angry copyright mob with sticks and stones.

Thoughts and quotes behind the cut.

If the judge was involved in three major copyright organisations, with members including several of the prosecutors, how unbiased can his judgement be? Hit the image for fail-graph.

(see Torrentfreak for more details)

And more importantly, why didn’t this news break earlier … Peter Sunde’s lawyer has already appealed for a retrial.

“Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century.”

Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the world’s largest Intellectual Proprietors.

At 11 AM this morning, the Swedish court declared the verdict in the The Pirate Bay trial: all four defendants found guilty, a hefty fine ($3,620,000) and one year jail time for each of them.

After following the trial closely for 2 weeks on this blog, I can only conclude that this sentence is too harsh. I can also recommend Sofia’s twitter feed, who’s translating the rest of the verdict as we speak.

More updates, summary and transcript of the Press Conference  and thoughts behind the cut

No updates from me today, it’s a pretty hectic week. I happily refer to Torrentfreak, which has excellent coverage of today’s Spectrial. The verdict falls on april 17. Excellent summary of the last day here.

In my personal opinion, the big problems in this Spectrial are:

Today, it was time for the defendants to call up some witnesses. Kristoffer Schollin, specialist in IT law who did a thesis on DRM, and Roger Wallis, professor at KTH Computer Science Department. It seems to me these last days of the trial have ventured away from the actual charges, for the court to take time to see this in a wider perspective. I think this is a good thing, but also a very delicate move to make. At the end, a judgement has to fall on these 4 individuals. But it’s good to see the problems and technology explained in court and getting media attention.

More behind the cut. (in the picture: Anna, who blogs live summaries on bambuser. Keep up the good work!)