The Pirate Bay's "spectrial" got underway in Sweden Monday morning as prosecutors laid out the charges. Appearing before a packed house of bloggers, press, and people dressed as pirates, prosecutor Hakan Roswall made his opening statement, charging The Pirate Bay with aiding in massive copyright infringement and profiting from its actions.

Three Pirate Bay defendants and Carl Lundstom, a Swedish businessman who used to run Rix Telecom and is accused of being a Pirate Bay investor, were in the dock listening. Roswall painted the group as businesspeople out to make serious money from their operations, and he detailed the site's genesis and growth since being launched back in 2004.

Those who understand what The Pirate Bay is and how BitTorrent works won't find much new or shocking in Roswall's summary of the case; the question is simply whether creating a search engine and tracker service that traffics mainly in copyrighted content is illegal in Sweden or not.

Content owners did provide a bit of new information, however—specifically, the amount of money that record labels and movie studios want from The Pirate Bay. It turns out to be over $13 million (117 million kronor).

For a trial taking place in Sweden and broadcast only in Swedish, one of the remarkable aspects of the "spectrial" is the interest and involvement of people from around the world. With Swedish media outlets making the audio stream of the trial available, bilingual webheads have been translating and summarizing the day's action on the Web and—in a remarkable show of commitment to the cause—though hundreds of tweets.

In addition, The Pirate Bay defendants are themselves blogging, tweeting, and holding press conferences (one was held on Sunday; Swedish TV4 was banned for past "bad behavior"). They are intent on seeing the trial as mere spectacle and sideshow, a last gasp of the absurd from some dying industries, and one that will be demolished by people power.

In an editorial released this weekend "via the internets," The Pirate Bay wrote that the way this trial differs "from most earlier trials is that everything in and surrounding it will whirl round and round in diverse channels of communication; to be discussed, reinterpreted, copied and criticized. Every crack in their appeal will be penetrated by the gaze of thousands upon thousands of eyes on the internets, in all the channels covering the trial. Old cliches from the antipiracy lobby wont stick. You won’t be able to say stuff like, 'you can’t compete with free' or 'filesharing is theft' without a thousand voices making fun of you."

Despite the glib tone and tough words, the defendants face up to two years in jail and potentially massive fines. They may consider the trial to be little more than spectacle, but if so, it's a spectacle with real consequences.

The defendants claim not to be worried. Tweeting from within the trial today, The Pirate Bay's programmer Peter Sunde wrote, "How the hell did they think this was going to be something else than EPIC FAIL for the prosecution? We're winning so hard."

Ludvig Werner, the boss of IFPI's local Swedish chapter, had a somewhat different perspective: The Pirate Bay is about keeping money out of creators' hands and putting it into Pirate Bay pockets. "Copyright exists to ensure that everyone in the creative world—from the artist to the record label, from the independent film producer to the TV programme maker—can choose how their creations are distributed and get fairly rewarded for their work," he said in a statement.

"The operators of The Pirate Bay have violated those rights and, as the evidence in Court will show, they did so to make substantial revenues for themselves. That kind of abuse of the rights of others cannot be allowed to continue, and that is why these criminal proceedings are so important for the health of the creative community."