The Pirate Bay trial (mercifully) began its wrap-up today, with closing statements from prosecutor Hakan Roswall and the entertainment industry lawyers who are simultaneously pressing their cases. Roswall spent his time recapping the case, and then asked the court to toss the defendants in a jail cell for one year—down from the two-year maximum that could have been requested.

Contributing to infringement

Roswall dropped several charges on the second day of the trial for the purpose of streamlining the case, Ars was told, which leaves contributory copyright infringement as the main charge. The Pirate Bay might not host content itself, but if its main use is as a middleman that arranges illegal peer-to-peer transfers, Roswall said that the site could be held responsible.

"A person who is holding someone's coat while they assault someone else is complicit in the crime," he said, according to Swedish paper The Local.

And Monique Wadsted, the lawyer for the movie industry, told the court that it was a basic point of Swedish law that one can't just walk around with eyes closed when one knows that crimes are being committed.

Wadsted also claimed that The Pirate Bay was built for piracy, and she noted that site admins do in fact police the site for child pornography, inactive torrents, and misleading descriptions. Given that sort of control over the material, is it credible simply to see The Pirate Bay as a hand-off forum that allows all sorts of user postings for which it cannot be held liable?

The defense is continuing to claim that the European Union e-commerce directive passed in 2000 protects them from liability. The relevant part of the directive is Article 12, the "mere conduit" section, which says that a "service provider" is not liable for the information transmitted by its users.

The rule applies only to "service providers," raising the question of whether The Pirate Bay qualifies, and it only applies when three conditions are met: the service provider must not 1) initiate the transfer, 2) select the receiver of the transfer, 3) modify the transfer in any way.

The Pirate Bay team wants a ruling from a European court on whether the directive applies to the site, but prosecutor Hakan Roswall says that won't be necessary. Though he admits the directive applies, "It doesn’t mean some sort of immunity for middlemen," he told the court. "And there is no reason to request an opinion from the European Court."

Organized and rich?

At least on these issues, the facts are not in serious dispute; the question is a matter of law and interpretation. When it comes to the duties, organization, and income from The Pirate Bay, though, even the agreement on facts disappears. Roswall and the entertainment industry lawyers again repeated their claim that the site rakes in plenty of money—perhaps 10 million kronor ($1 million) a year in profit.

These amounts don't appear to be based on bank balance information or canceled checks, though, but on a calculation of the number of site .torrent files accessed in a year, multiplied by some projected ad rate, multiplied by the number of ads each downloader would likely see. The numbers led defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi to reply, "Prosecution claims 64 adspaces on TPB. But there's two to four. And they count the earned money on number of adspaces."

The projected income figure also lead to an outburst from fellow defendant Gottfried Svartholm Warg during a court recess. "It's totally absurd, those numbers are totally disconnected from reality," he said. And then, referring to the prosecutor: "The old bastard's crazy."

In addition to revenue questions, the prosecution team doesn't believe the various Pirate Bay stories about decentralized organization, ad-hoc decision-making, and all the rest of it. Closing statements attempted to show a stronger level of organization than the site backers admit to, and Kolmisoppi was accused of being far more than just a site spokesman.

"Oh, I'm apparently the boss of everybody I know," Kolmisoppi then tweeted.

Not like Google

Finally, industry lawyers attacked the repeated Pirate Bay claim that they are essentially like Google. While it is true that Google returns links to all sorts of illegal and infringing content, and that The Pirate Bay hosts legal material, the lawyers claimed that the big difference between the two sites is the fact that one cooperates with rights-holders and one does not.

We heard this claim during the trial when John Kennedy of music trade group IFPI flew up from London and talked about his antipiracy team and how they are in daily communication with Google. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, famously posted (and then ridiculed) the letters it received from rights-holders asking for material to be removed from the site.

End of the "spectrial"

As the "spectrial" wraps up, we were again reminded today that it is about more than spectacle, theater, and shenanigans; jail time is at stake. Roswall asked the court for a one-year sentence, while Wadsted thought the defendants deserved far more time in a cell.

Tomorrow, the four defendants will make their own closing statements, and the trial wraps up on Wednesday morning.