Fredrik Neij – one of the accused in the trial against thepiratebay.org – took some time to manage the website remotely in the middle of the closing argument.

– A server was down and I restarted it, Neij tells expressen.se. He is one of the four founders of The Pirate Bay that stand accused of “complicity to making copyrighted material accessible” (yes, that’s the charge). That didn’t stop him from taking care of a server mishap in the middle of the trial’s closing argument.

Thepiratebay.org was down during the best part of Monday, which had a good deal of file-sharing folks worried that the website might be down for good this time. Thankfully for them, he had his trusty laptop at hand and could restart the server remotely, so that eager fileswappers could get back inside.

-We have Internet access [in the court room] so it was no problem, Neij told Expressen today (Tuesday);

-Besides, I’m keeping up with the coverage of the trial.

The farcical battle between a sadly incompetent prosecution vs. knowledgeable and sometimes loud-mouthed defendants is almost at an end, and the fact that Neij manages thepiratebay.org’s servers remotely during the trial is just one of several examples that point out the huge gap in technical know-how that the sides have exhibited.

Already during the second day, the prosecution had to change its original charges – on the grounds that it was finally starting to grasp how BitTorrent technology actually works. A part that mentioned production [of copyrighted material] had to be removed, and all that was left was “complicity to making [copyrighted material] available”.

Both sides are now well into the closing arguments, and none of them have brought any surprises to the table. The side of the prosecution calls for jail time while the defense claims that no crime has ever been committed, and that users are individually responsible for the torrent files they upload.