The Spectrial: corporate parasites take on pirates in swedish court

by dave onion

The Swedish government recently had 3 web technicians in their courts to answer for the high crimes of sharing. In what is being dubbed the Spectrial (between spectacle and trial), the defendants are being accused by some of the most wealthy corporate parasites of the music industry of copyright infringement. The Swedish pirates however, unlike those pirates of yesteryear - the visionaries of brute force capital accumulation - were being challenged not for violently dispossessing anyone of goods, but for helping to make informational commodities like music, movies and software as widely available as possible for free.  The defendants run the website thepiratebay.org, a search engine for BitTorrent filesharing.

File sharing, for those who are unfamiliar with the practice, is an especially easy way to share music, movies and other digital files across the internet (see sidebar). The Pirate Bay, though just one of many such sites, is an especially popular one known and loved for their defiant attitude in the face of the law and corporations.

The  International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) representing the likes of Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony and other major corporations, repeatedly made fools of themselves as well as the very notions of copyrights themselves as they blundered through the trial.  At one point the demanded the loss generating website pay some 1.2 million kronor (US$ 146,669) which prosecutor Hakan Roswall insisted was the minimum profit generated by the loss generating crew at pirate bay.  An additional 117 million kronor (US$13 million) in damages to sales was also demanded by the plaintiffs.

By the 2nd day of the trial, the prosecution, realizing they had confused most of the technical points they were arguing their case with, dropped all charges but "making available of copyrighted works", which according to the prosecution would allow them to focus on what they were in court for in the first place.

During the course of the trial, which attracted enormous attention in Sweden as well as international techie and filesharing spheres, a number of electronic direct actions took place. The first, targeting the IFPI's website, one of the complainants in the suit, was hacked and defaced with a message to the prosecutor. When the site was brought back up, a denial-of-service-attack crashed the site again. A few days later, hackers took over Bonnier Amigo's site, a record company. This time the following message was posted on the front page:

"Stop lying Peter Danowsky! (prosecuting attorney - ed.)
You censor us, we censor you. Freedom of speech goes both ways.
This is a war you can never win. The people always win one way or another.
The people will always have their freedom.
Brothers stand behind us and together we will win this fight!"

A major subtext of the trial and its implications has to do with control and democracy on the internet, which has been a major struggle since the internet's inception. And as with other areas such as drug patents, where we've seen incredibly rich corporations use patent law to further channel wealth to elites and consolidate their own control, here some of the worst exploiters of artists and their fans (they would say consumers) have made some very public moves to attempt to seriously restrict access to what in many ways is still a new sort of commons, a space which is very public to those with access to the technology. It's been a sore spot for the music industry who are quickly losing control of product as the media of choice is so much less tangible or confineable.

Peter Sunde, one of the defendants, stressed the importance of just that aspect of the internet in a pre-trial press conference: "...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.”

In the background, the trial has also generated a good deal of chatter in online discussions that go well beyond copyright law and the personal harassment of pirates to discuss the nature of capitalism and property itself.

As of press time the Spectrial has wrapped up and is awaiting a verdict due some time April 17th. The defendants still could face up to 2 years prison and massive fines. But it seems that regardless of the outcome, and (regardless of legality), filesharing is here to stay.

See how to share files here !!!