The trial against “ThePirateBay.org” (TPB) has begun and it’s nothing short of fascinating. Music and Film companies have been itching to get their hands on “IP culprits” responsible for keeping the technology of bit torrent alive and kicking and their day of salvation arrived when Swedish authorities raided a data center that housed several of TPB’s servers. They confiscated some of the servers as evidence and the contents found therein were used as the grounds to file a case. On January 2008, the prosecutor charged 3 site administrators with “assisting copyright infringement” and “assisting making available copyright infringement.” Trials officially started on February 16, 2009 and after just one day before the court, about 50% of the charges were dropped because they were unable to prove that TPB had a direct connection to the transfer of files other than hosting an index of trackers.
I’m really interested in how this case will be resolved. I think this is the first time that a court will decide the legality of the bit torrent technology and although the decision will be binding only in Sweden, I still think it will be a breakthrough in IPL and is worthy of being called the “spectrial of the decade”.
***Tweets on the trial are available. Search for #spectrial on twitter.com
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