Just hours ago The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån held a joint press conference at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm. It was broadcasted live on the web and Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm spoke at length. Here is a breakdown of some of the key points.

The joint press conference was held mainly in Swedish and there was very little English. The media present had applied for invitations, and some representatives from the media had already been banned from attending by The Pirate Bay. Those in attendance were told that they should be courteous, which they were.

Sitting at the top table from left to right were Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyrån, Sara Sajjad of Piratbyrån, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) and Magnus Eriksson of Piratbyrån. Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and the fourth defendant Carl Lundström were not at the table.

Spectrial Press Conference (pic credit)

First off, they said that the whole case can be best described as a theater play and that all the people involved are potential actors. They vowed to make a reality TV-show of the whole trial, in fact Rasmus Fleischer has written the prologue for the show already. It’s a Spectrial, and they are happy to play along. As soon as the cameras stopped flashing, the panel took questions from the media that was present.

The Pirate Bay said that they feel that their overall case would not end quickly, implying legal appeals and were defiant that no matter what happens to them, the site will continue. “What are they going to do? They have already failed to take the site down once. Let them fail again,” said Gottfrid. It isn’t the site facing the courts noted Peter Sunde. “It has its own life without us,” he said.

The Pirate Bay team said that although they face huge financial claims, they weren’t going to be intimidated, with Gottfrid declaring, “I already have more debt in Sweden than I will ever be able to pay off. I don’t even live here. They are welcome to send me a bill. I will frame it and put it on the wall.”

Peter went on to explain there was no basis for the massive financial claims. “It does not matter if they require several million or one billion. We are not rich and have no money to pay,” he said. “They won’t get a cent.”

When asked if it was ok to download media without paying for it, Peter deemed the question to be “uninteresting” and said he was tired of hearing it.

A member of the media then posed this question: “Do you feel like defendants, or defenders of technology?”

Peter responded: “I think it is something in between actually. We have a personal liability for this, we have a personal risk which has some impact on our feelings. But definitely it’s not defending the technology, it’s more like defending the idea of the technology and that’s probably the most important thing in this case – the political aspect of letting the technology be free and not controlled by an entity which doesn’t like technology.”

Gottfrid added that the prosecutor of the case seems to focus a lot on the individuals in the case. “At least one fourth of the evidence is character assassination of the people involved,” he said.

Peter went on to explain that when he was arrested the police didn’t immediately start questioning him about site, rather his motivation. “When I had my only hearing with the police the first question was if I wanted to explain my ideology and my politics, not if I was involved in The Pirate Bay, which kind of sets the tone for all of this.”

The site’s finances were brought up, with the pair saying they started it and keep it going through advertising revenue, although the pair don’t make any money themselves.

A reporter from the BBC asked what the on-going maintenance costs of The Pirate Bay amount to. Peter responded, “So, the costs for Pirate Bay, I don’t actually don’t have any numbers for it. We use quite a lot of bandwidth and we have to buy new servers every other week.”

Gottfrid said that the tracker itself uses an average of 600mbits of bandwidth which increases further at weekends. He also revealed that their current hardware has to be replaced once a year and is currently estimated to be worth $120,000, therefore it is depreciating at the rate of $10,000 each month.

Towards the end of the conference the pair were asked for their assessment of the way they have been handled by the press.

“Well, that’s a very interesting question,” said Peter. “There are some members of the press who we don’t like so we didn’t invite them today and they are very mad at us.” Peter didn’t mention them by name at this point, but they were Aftonbladet, Metro and TV4. He explained the problem he has with these publications;

“They are just interested in doing something spectacular instead of actually discussing the issues. The media that are not invited today are basically the media that have not been negative, but lying instead and keeping things from the public.”

“We don’t have a problem with negative press,” Peter continued. “There are a lot of people in this room who don’t like us and we don’t really care about that as long as they discuss the issues. But I would say that most of the press have been very good towards us actually, in discussing more and more the issues surrounding The Pirate Bay instead of focusing on us as persons, which is what we actually want.”

The trial starts tomorrow and of course, TorrentFreak will keep everyone updated, but in the meantime, a thought-provoking comment from Peter;

“I do not believe The Pirate Bay will be a major player in five years. But I think BitTorrent technology will improve. File sharing will always exist. I think people will tire of the debate.”

Update: More goodies at Spectrial.