Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Swedish court allows audio webcast of Pirate Bay criminal trial

The operators of notorious peer-to-peer copyright infringement service The Pirate Bay go on trial in Sweden next Monday, and now comes word that you can hear it all. That's right, just like Federal Judge Nancy Gertner in Boston, who has given her OK for a webcast of a hearing in the Joel Tenenbaum case, the criminal court in Stockholm has granted permission for webcast of the Pirate Bay criminal case. Explains TorrentFreak:

According to Erik Fichtelius, head of Swedish public broadcaster SVT 24, the trial’s audio will be streamed by them, live on the Internet. “It is a major trial with exciting witnesses and expert interviews,” he told a Swedish journalists’ website.

SVT will broadcast live audio from the entire trial. Additional video would’ve been nice too, but under Swedish law this is not allowed. However, to complement the audio, SVT will have a reporter in the court room adding extra information to the stream and this will be complemented by additional images uploaded to the site.

Don't speak Swedish? Not to worry: Pirate Bay itself promises:
By the help of some friends, we will set up a translated and commentated stream. We will also discuss the trial with famous and/or interesting guests.
I wouldn't exactly trust Pirate Bay to provide reliable translation and commentary, but this will have to do. Let's hope the First Circuit is listening -- and that the Pirate Bay's courtroom antics don't give it pause.

4 comments:

  1. Ben wrote:
    "I wouldn't exactly trust Pirate Bay to provide reliable translation and commentary, but this will have to do."

    Why should it not be reliable translations?
    Do you now anything about the case/the background?

    Or don't you generally don't trust anything that is "copyleft" as being reliable? (I content that they are extrmely copyleft though)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would not trust any criminal defendant (or a group supporting him) to provide objective information on the case.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "reliable translation" is not "objective information".

    the "objective information" comes from the public service broadcaster.

    I'm sure the translators of those ~900000 (~10% of the population) swedes that support the "ciminal defendants" will not try to twist the words (I know of guys that probably will [IFPI anyone?]).

    Are you aware that the guys are not accused of copyrightinfringement since TPB simply does not store copyrighted content? And that the whole trial is simply a reation of the swedish gov to the demands of MPAA. Have you seen the reports on swedish public service broadcasting back then when TPB was raided and the then minister of justice got in trouble for his "working with MPAA"
    Are you aware that there is evidence that the swedish councel for organsed content themself was involfed in uplaoding the stuff that the "ciminal defendants" are now on trial?

    TPB is not fundamently different then google or yahoo and while google with its picture search even stores tiny copies of copyrighted images, tpb just stores textfiles that do not even contain any kind of copyrighted content what so ever.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't claim to know Swedish copyright law. But in the US, the notion that a web-based infringement facilitator can avoid liability just because it doesn't host the content itself has been rejected repeatedly. See Napster, Grokster, Aimster...

    ReplyDelete

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