Today’s scheduled witnesses are Magnus Mårtensson, a lawyer for the IFPI, Anders Nilsson of Antipiratbyrån and John Stéenmark.
Prosecutor Håkan Roswall begins by saying that Tobias Andersson from Piratbyrån, John Stéenmark and police officer Jim Keyzer no longer have to testify. The Judge asked the Prosecution about Jim Keyzer, but they said they hadn’t been able to get hold of him but had sent an e-mail to try and find out. The defense says they will hear Tobias Andersson tomorrow.
The Prosecutor then further modified the charges against the defendants. He no longer claims that all The Pirate Bay’s components are necessary in order to share files. He further added to the charges that TPB allows its users to upload torrents and that TPB then store the torrents on their server. There was no immediate objection to the changes. IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky introduced yet more new evidence, but the defense won’t comment on it until they have had a chance to examine it.
First up to testify was Magnus Mårtensson, a lawyer for the IFPI. The court heard that Mårtensson has been working for the IFPI for 15 years, specializing in anti-piracy work. He explained that he worked gathering evidence against The Pirate Bay by downloading various music albums via .torrent files he obtained from the site using the Azureus client.
Mårtensson’s evidence gathering equipment consisted only of screenshots, as quickly became apparent. Mårtensson’s technological ability was called into question and he acknowledged that it was difficult for him to answer some technical questions.
When asked if he had any network equipment logging exactly what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ of any of his sample downloads, he replied that he didn’t. When asked if he verified in any way during the download process that he had any contact with The Pirate Bay’s tracker, again the answer was negative.
Defendant Gottfrid Svartholm questioned Mårtensson on his evidence gathering techniques. The following questions are particularly interesting as they show that the prosecution has no evidence that the Pirate Bay trackers were actually used.
Gottfrid: Before taking the screenshot, did you turn off DHT and Peer Exchange?
Mårtensson: DHT was obviously on. I wanted to be like an average user.
Gottfrid: So in other words, you can’t check if the tracker was used?
Mårtensson: The tracker address was visible on the screen. From that I assumed it was used in some way.
Gottfrid: But since you had DHT on, you have no possibility to state to the court as to whether The Pirate Bay’s tracker was actually used or not?
Mårtensson: No.
It seems unthinkable that the Prosecution has gathered ‘evidence’ in this way. Mårtensson was further asked if he was aware that Google can also act as a torrent search engine. The IFPI lawer seemed to be unaware of that, and he stated that they never had any problems with Google.
After a short break ex-policeman Magnus Nilsson of the Anti-Piracy Office was next up. He described how he downloaded several .torrent files from The Pirate Bay as part of his evidence gathering, and he explained in detail how one downloads files with BitTorrent. Nilsson told that he downloaded several games and movies, all with uTorrent.
Then, Nilsson came out to say that he was sure that a majority of the content on The Pirate Bay was copyrighted. However, he had no evidence that supports this claim. The defense lawyers pressed him on this and he had to cave in, “I have no documentation as to the claim that most material is copyrighted. It is just an opinion,” Nilsson said.
One of the defense lawyers (Carl Lundtröm’s) used the same line of questioning as he did with Magnus Mårtensson. He asked what BitTorrent program Nilsson used. Then he asked if he downloaded that program from The Pirate Bay. When told no, he asked a couple of questions about the download process to show that TPB isn’t involved in the actual transfer.
“So the actual downloading [of the pirated works/files] happens outside of TPB?” Carl Lundström’s lawyer asked. “Yes,” Anders Nilsson replied.
Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the defendants, asked Nilsson to confirm that he is an investigator working for an entertainment industry lobby group, and that the lobby group gave him instructions on what files and works to investigate. This was obviously to clarify to the court that Anders Nilsson is not an objective investigator.
After only two hours the court decided to end the hearings for today. Tobias Andersson of Piratbyrån and John Kennedy of IFPI will be heard tomorrow.
More news tomorrow
