Prosecutors drop most serious charges against The Pirate Bay on only the second day of trial in Sweden

This article is more than 11 years old

This article is more than 11 years old

The prosecution has dropped the most serious charges against the irreverent Swedish filesharing service The Pirate Bay on only the second day of its trial for assisting widespread copyright infringement.

After being unable to prove in court that illegally distributed files had used The Pirate Bay site – despite clear markers in the files, which are labelled with the Pirate Bay name – the prosecution, representing a swathe of high-profile music and film companies including Warner Bros, MGM, Universal and EMI – had to abandon almost half the charges.

Co-defendant Fredrik Neij said that prosecutor Håkan Roswall had misunderstood the technology and that his evidence did not implicate The Pirate Bay.

The prosecution then had to drop all charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement", leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyrighted content", with Roswall adding that "everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim".

Per Samuelson, the lawyer representing the defence, claimed the prosecutor's slip-up was a sensation. "It is very rare to win half the target in just one and a half days, and it is clear that the prosecutor took strong note of what we said yesterday," he commented, referring to an earlier comment that supplying a service that can be used illegally is not in itself illegal.

The prosecution immediately down played the setback, claiming that dropping the charges related to copying copyrighted works would simplify the case against The Pirate Bay.

"It's a largely technical issue," said Peter Danowsky, legal counsel for the music companies that brought the case.

"It changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor's case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works."

The Pirate Bay does not host content itself, but indexes files hosted by users of the peer-to-peer filesharing tool BitTorrent. Users search the site to find the files they want, and then download them directly from other users' machines.

The site, based in Sweden, has been a persistent thorn in the side of the big media companies since it launched in 2003, already dodging one legal threat and repeatedly baiting what it sees as an outdated industry.

"It's not defending the technology," said co-defendant Peter Sunde in a press conference.

"It's more like defending the idea of the technology and that's probably the most important thing in this case – the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn't like technology."

If you want to follow coverage of the trial, see our previous blogpost.