Pirate Bay trial starts Monday

[Carlos Spicy Wiener]

The Pirate Bay goes on trial in Sweden this upcoming Monday, and the site's backers are ready to unleash a media juggernaut of bloggers, Twitterers, and press with the help of a city bus and a live audio stream of the entire trial.


The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event, but when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. The Swedish trial against the notorious BitTorrent tracker opens next Monday, and it will come complete with live streamed audio from the courtroom, a Twitter feed, a translation service, and a city bus currently being driven from Belgrade to Stockholm.

The folks on trial are referring to the event as a "spectrial," a combination of "spectacle" and "trial," and there's little doubt it will be. The Pirate Bay backers are on trial for secondary copyright infringement in a case that has been building for several years. The trial begins on February 16 and is slated to go through March 4, with everyone from The Pirate Bay's young backers to the head of the IFPI taking the stand to give evidence. In the middle of it all, on February 20, a "HUGE PARTY" is scheduled.

Public broadcaster SVT will stream audio of the trial, though video recordings from the courtroom are not allowed. The case will (obviously) be held in Swedish, with translation services offered to English-speaking witnesses, but The Pirate Bay wants to make the trial even more accessible to a wider audience. "Of course, this is not enough for us," they write on their new trial-tracking website. "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." No word yet on how this will work or how to access it.

The Pirate Bay also hopes to set up a media center outside the courtroom, though with a twist?the center will be a city bus. The bus, called S23K, is currently wending its way through Poland (you can track its progress online), facing various and sundry crises such as gas stations that don't accept euros. In Gdansk, the bus will take a ferry up to northern Sweden, and it is scheduled to arrive in Stockholm before the trial begins. Once there, it will be parked somewhere near the courthouse and "it will be used to intensify the spectacle, among other things functioning as a press center for The Pirate Bay and Piratbyr?n and as a physical gathering place for sympathisers and curious people."

Somewhat oddly, the HUGE PARTY and the bus trip have both been underwritten by donations. Paying to purchase content is right out, of course, but there's a good list of people willing to pony up for both beer and a Belgrade city bus.

Of course, there's also a big press conference scheduled for Sunday, though The Pirate Bay won't speak to just anybody. Models of upright social behavior themselves, the site's backers can't waste their time with "people who really just can?t behave." They also "do not speak with assholes," and reserve the right to deny press conference access to anyone "just having [a] bad attitude." Clear enough?

With the help of Web streaming, bloggers, Twitter feeds (#spectrial), IRC channels, websites, and one piratical bus, The Pirate Bay is set to fight The Man, but the Swedish establishment and the music business have been preparing for this day for year. Will they at last be able to sink The Pirate Bay?

The founders thumb their noses at the majesty of the law, of course; even if found guilty, they have no plans to shut down The Pirate Bay's global network of servers.

Late update: IFPI, music's global trade group, has issued a statement of its own on the upcoming trial. John Kennedy, the group's chairman (and someone scheduled to testify in Stockholm in a couple weeks), said, "The evidence in this case will show that The Pirate Bay is a commercial business which made substantial amounts of money for its operators, despite their claim to be only interested in spreading culture for free."

"A healthy and fairly-rewarded music sector needs protecting from services such as The Pirate Bay. The criminal prosecution comes at a time of rapid, positive change in the business models of creative industries in Sweden and elsewhere. Swedish music consumers have a wide range of choices among legitimate digital music services. These offer great consumer choice while at the same time rewarding and respecting the rights of creators.?


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