Special correspondent Oscar Swartz reports.



STOCKHOLM – The Pirate Bay prosecutor altered the copyright-infringement charges Tuesday to make it easier to convict the four defendants who co-founded the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

Moments later, Hollywood investigators testified about the ease with which they obtained copyright works using the 5-year-old site.

But at the outset of Tuesday's proceedings, the prosecutor, Håkan

Roswall, announced a alteration of the charges, which legal scholars suggested would make it more likely to win a conviction.

The prosecutor removed one sentence from the part of his summons where the purported crimes are described. Until Tuesday, it read:

"The Pirate Bay consists of three sub-components: an index portal in the form of a website with search functionality, a database with related directory containing the torrent files, and a tracker feature.

The tracker feature creates a 'peer-to-peer' network of users who want to share the same file. All components are necessary for the users of the service to share files between them."

In the altered version, he removed the concluding sentence starting with "All components."

Daniel Westman, a legal scholar at "The Swedish Law and Informatics

Research Institute" at Stockholm University, suggested the prosecutor likely feels uncertain that he can prove all three elements.

"The question is whether the defendants fulfill the requirements in the penal code for complicity in a crime. One could maybe argue that the degree of complicity were higher if all three components could be proven, but the court may as well decide that only one or two is enough," Westman said.

The crowd at the Pirate Bay trial here was noticeably smaller when the proceedings continued Tuesday after being dark Monday. Last week, there were overflowing hordes of onlookers when the four Pirate Bay defendants took the stand in the trial's opening days.

Apparently in the same clothing as Friday, the defendants sat in the back of the courtroom flanked by their lawyers, while two piracy busters who gathered evidence of illegal file sharing took the witness stand.

Magnus Mårtensson, a lawyer for the International Federation of Phonographic Industries — the worldwide counterpart of the Recording Industry Association of America — testified he visited The Pirate Bay site and looked for "Intensive Care" by Robbie Williams, downloaded the torrent file and started his copy of BitTorrent client Azureus.

He showed the courtroom screen shots of the beginning of the download and after it had finished. He testified it was the copyright property of EMI.

Anders Nilsson, a former police officer now working for the Anti-Piracy Bureau, seemed technically savvier and displayed to the gallery fuller printouts of activities and peers for various downloads.

Defense lawyer Per E. Samuelson went through the Robbie Williams case in detail and pointed out that someone with a nickname "russiananorak" had uploaded the torrent. When asked if Mårtensson or IFPI had done anything to find this uploader or any of the four peers that he downloaded the work from, the answer was "No." The same answer was given to similar questions put to Nilsson.

It was all part of the Pirate Bay defendants' defense: The 5-year-old site with about 22 million users doesn't infringe copyrighted works, but rather points the way to where chunks of files of copyright works can be accumulated and automatically assembled into full copies of copyright material.

Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter

Sunde and Carl Lundström face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000.

But the stated defense might not help the four skirt Swedish law. The four defendants are not accused of committing copyright infringement directly. They are accused of "complicity in a crime" through facilitating copyright infringement.

The case against the Pirate Bay is not Sweden's only battle against file sharing.

The Swedish Parliament is expected to adopt a proposal on Wednesday that, for the first time, would make it possible for rights holders to force ISPs to hand out information about their subscribers, so they can be sued for copyright infringement.

"It will make it possible for wealthy industries to act as a private police force and bankrupt ordinary families with children, just like in neighboring Denmark," said Christian Engstrom, a Pirate Party candidate for the EU Parliament.

Over the weekend, three Lund University sociology scholars wrote in the op-ed pages of Sweden's largest daily, Dagens Nyheter, that 75 percent of Sweden's youth does not care what the law says about illegal downloading. They predicted a general erosion of support for the legal system if laws are too far removed from the opinions of the masses.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, celebrated a public relations victory of sorts late Friday when it was awarded the Freedom Prize of 2008 by the Stockholm section of the Moderate Youth Party.

Trial continues Wednesday, when John Kennedy, the IFPI international chairman and CEO, is expected to testify.

Wired.com is providing gavel-to-gavel coverage.

See Also: