Another day, another laugh

2/24/2009 | 4:58 PM | Evolved Rationalist

Guest post by plot regarding The Pirate Bay spectrial.

It was just like any other day in the courtroom where the spectrial was to take place. Stupidity by the prosecution, grilling by the defense lawyers, and the prosecution getting even more egg on their faces and looking exactly like n00bs.

For today's spectrial, the witnesses were:

Magnus Mårtensson, IFPI lawyer
Anders Nilsson, Antipiratbyrån
John Stéenmark

The missing police officer

The day started with the prosecutor saying that Jim Keyzer (the police officer involved in the TPB raid) no longer had to testify even after being paid a large sum of money by the prosecution. They then claimed that Keyzer has gone AWOL and that they had no idea where he was at the moment.

More shifting of the goalposts

The prosecution again modified the charges, now admitting that not all parts of TPB are necessary to share files. However, he added to the list of charges that TPB servers were used to store torrents that were uploaded by the users (there was no mention here of the fact that torrents do not actually contain any copyrighted files, but only point to the locations of the file all over the internet).

Magnus Mårtensson, IFPI Screenshot Man

Why is he called the Screenshot Man? Well, this guy admitted in court that after specializing in anti-piracy investigations and working for 15 years at the IFPI, the only evidence that he gathered against TPB consisted of screenshots of him downloading albums by way of torrent files.

Could he answer technical questions? No, and he freely admitted this in court.

Did he know what was going on on a technical level as he was downloading those files? He answered that he didn't.

When asked if he had evidence that he connected to TPB's tracker while downloading, he admitted that he didn't.

When asked if he knew that Google could act as a torrent search engine, he said that he was unaware of this. The best part was when he mentioned not having any 'problems' with Google.

Stick up for big companies with money, there you go, Screenshot Man.

What exactly does he know? What exactly was he being paid to investigate? I have no idea either, even after witnessing his blunders first-hand in court.

We do have to wonder what exactly the prosecution's motives are at this point. They had years to prepare for this trial, and this is the best they could come up with? Doesn't something seem fishy?

Pulling shit out of antipirate ass

Short break.

Magnus Nilsson called to the stand, and described how he downloaded torrent files from TPB, etc. Boring stuff.

All that was fine and good, but next he said that he was "sure" that most content on TPB was copyrighted. When pressed by the defense, he then changed his statement, claiming instead that "It is just an opinion."

It isn't just an opinion, antipirate liar. It is called lying in court. Doing it for the MPAA/RIAA big bucks?

Lundström's lawyer then got him to admit that the actual downloading of the files does not take place on TPB, and that TPB has nothing to do with the transfers.

The jokes do not end there

Anakata (Svartholm) got Nilsson to admit that he is working for a lobby group that steered him in the direction that they wanted him to investigate.

That ends the reporting of the spectrial for today. At the rate it is going, we are winning, but remember that sometimes big bucks call the shots.

Maintain hardline kopimi.

Kopimi love,
plot