In April The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each of them was ordered to pay the entertainment industry $905,000 in damages. The defendants soon announced that they would appeal, and the date for the new trial has been set for November by the Appeal Court.
Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest this February. Many had hoped that the Court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker is no offense, and indeed the ten day trial started off with a small victory for the defendants.
On day two of the trial the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker, and he had to let go of all charges that accused the Pirate Bay folks of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.
What remained is the claim that they were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The prosecution argued that this was indeed the case and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files in as evidence, and the judge agreed with this assessment.
More: http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-appeal-scheduled-for-november-090903/
Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest this February. Many had hoped that the Court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker is no offense, and indeed the ten day trial started off with a small victory for the defendants.
On day two of the trial the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker, and he had to let go of all charges that accused the Pirate Bay folks of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.
What remained is the claim that they were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The prosecution argued that this was indeed the case and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files in as evidence, and the judge agreed with this assessment.
More: http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-appeal-scheduled-for-november-090903/