The Pirate Bay trial wrapped up today in Sweden as the defendants gave their closing statements; the verdict is currently scheduled for April 17th. In the meantime, "I think we're going to go party," said defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi in a brief press conference after the trial.

The Pirate Bay website was down yesterday after power failures at one of its data centers, but defendant Fredrik Neij brought it back online today from within the court, even as the four lawyers stood one by one to defend the legality of the site.

Their main point was made throughout the trial: The Pirate Bay is a mere search engine and repository of user-uploaded content. It hosts no copyrighted files. All file transfers are between the machines of the end-users, and they never pass through Pirate Bay servers. Neij's lawyer insisted that the name of the site not be taken into account in coming to a verdict, either; people may say and think what they want, but the trial must focus solely on whether a law has been broken.

Carl Lundstr�m, the wealthy Swede who had some business dealings with The Pirate Bay, pressed these main points even further. His lawyer said that the very Internet infrastructure was at issue in the case; all sorts of sites and services that are completely legal—such as Google—link to at least some infringing content, or allow users to upload such material. Roads and telephones are likewise used to plot and execute illegal activities all the time, but no one talks about destroying the road network or hauling telephone companies into court.

One key difference between, say, roads and The Pirate Bay is that roads are used largely for legal activities. As for The Pirate Bay, the argument might be made that nearly all of its popular downloads are in fact illegal. Prosecutors made this assertion numerous times, but somewhat shockingly never did any sort of survey of site content.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's lawyer pointed this out, saying that no one knows the ratio of legal to illegal content on the site. In fact, the only person to present such evidence was defendant Peter Sunde, who claimed that a survey of his own showed that 80 percent of the 1,000 .torrent files he examined appeared to point toward material that was legal to distribute. For obvious reasons, the prosecutor and the entertainment lawyers didn't think much of this statistic, but they didn't provide a credible alternative of their own.

While prosecutors repeatedly tried to show that the site was a commercial money-making enterprise intent on profiting specifically from piracy, the defense team said that nothing could be further from the truth. Prosecutors have never been able to point to bank accounts or piles of cash that would justify their claims, but they have provided advertising contracts and estimates of ad revenue from the site. Defense lawyers pointed out that the main contract in question was never actually implemented, and that the ad revenue calculation was based on far more advertising slots than actually exist on the site. In reality, said the defendants, site revenue pays the operational bills and little more.

Speaking in a brief English-language press conference after the trial ended today, Peter Sunde expressed confidence that The Pirate Bay would win the case. A guilty verdict would "be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet," he said. "It's quite obvious which side is the good side."

Further reading:

Some of the most detailed trial coverage actually came through Twitter users like Sofia and matti_kolu, who listened to the live stream of the trial (in Swedish) and posted thousands of short English summaries

Listing image by Flickr user Nordgren