On February 16th 2009, the trial of The Pirate Bay will start in Sweden. Details of the case have been scarce thus far, but one of the witnesses for the prosecution will be a police officer who got a job at Warner Bros. last year. Pirate Bay's co-founder Peter Sunde promised to bring more competent witnesses to court.

Almost three years have passed since The Pirate Bay’s servers were seized by the Swedish police.

In the years since the raid a lot has changed. For one, The Pirate Bay grew to become the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet and one of the most prominent sites in the world. Some estimate that approximately 50% of all Internet traffic is coordinated by The Pirate Bay tracker.

The Pirate Bay raid eventually led to an investigation that took two years to complete. The police reported its findings in 4,000 pages of legal paperwork and in three weeks from now, starting February 16th, it will be tested in court. Four individuals are charged with ‘assisting copyright infringement’, while several copyright holders together are claiming over $100 million in damages.

The fate of the four will partly depend on the expert witnesses presented by both sides. The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde revealed some of the witnesses the prosecution will call, while casting doubt on their competence. Among them, IFPI CEO John Kennedy and policeman employee Jim Keyzer, who later took a job at Warner Bros.

It is interesting to see the name of Jim Keyzer there, since his objectivity was put in serious doubt after he accepted a job at Warner Bros. while he was still working on the Pirate Bay investigation. Keyzer returned to his job at the police’s IT crime unit after being employed by Warner Bros. for several months.

Warner Bros. later admitted that Keyzer started working for the movie studio before the Pirate Bay investigation was closed, but the prosecution didn’t see this as a problem. Peter Sunde does, as he writes in a recent post on his blog. “Our side has not finalized the list of expert witnesses. But our witnesses will actually add competence, based on facts and research, and will correctly interpret the law surrounding this case.”

“We will not have a bunch of uninteresting CEOs that have nothing to add beside their own anger at having to adopt their business to the current media climate – a climate where the people decide, not the high earning CEOs,” Peter adds. “It’s a shame the prosecution do not take this case seriously enough to actually put facts instead of feelings on the table. But it doesn’t matter. Both our facts and our feelings are honest and in our favor.”

It is likely that the defendant’s lawyers will use Keyzer’s employment at Warner Bros. to raise questions about the objectivity of the whole police investigation. Peter couldn’t reveal the witnesses they will call, but he told TorrentFreak that we’ll hear more about that in the near future. Stay tuned.