The Pirate Bay Retrial – Episodes 6 & 7
Again a quick summary of today’s and yesterday’s most important moment in the Pirate Bay appeal case:
Yesterday the main focus of the hearing was on the question of how harmful is illegal file sharing for the music industry after all. Of course, two opposite views were eagerly presented – on one side there were Ludwig Werner of the IFPI and Universal Music’s Per Sundin both claiming piracy is hurting the music industry a lot, and on the other side there was media professor Roger Wallis trying to convince the court that file-sharing should be seen primarily as means to increase sales of live event tickets and promote new artists.
Per Sundin not only pointed to illegal filesharing as the main culprit for the loss in sales of the music industry but named The Pirate bay accountable for 50% of this loss, admitting, however that he could prove none of his claims.
Wallis, a media professor, composer and Chairman of the Swedish Composers of Popular Music whose involvement in several other outfits dedicated to the rights of musicians got many believe he’s working for the music industry, actually condemned the latter failure to adapt to new business models more suitable to the digital era we live in.
Says TorrentFreak: "Wallis went on to explain that while some people download, these people also tend to buy more CDs than others that don’t. It’s not just downloading causing competition for the industry, other things have an effect such as the growth of computer games, he said.
Wallis believes the music industry is shooting itself in the foot by going after file-sharers, for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. He said that on the whole, file-sharing is beneficial to the music and movie industries, while pointing out that the movie industry just had its most successful year ever. But the music industry doesn’t help itself he argues. Anyone who has bought a Beatles single in the past, simply cannot buy the same single in the digital domain due to licensing issues. “This is madness,” he said."
Day 7:
While the defense will give its final arguments on Friday when the retrial has its last day, today was mainly about the prosecution presenting its closing arguments. Four seems to be the magic number in the industry – this time Håkan Roswall, Peter Danowsky, Henrik Pontén and Monique Wadsted all joined efforts in claiming both jail time and a large damage compensation is in order for The Pirate Bay defendants due to the harm they cause to the music industry.
After saying that all four defendants have been involved in the site’s operations and are more or less equally responsible for copyright infringement facilitation, prosecutor Håkan Roswall went on arguing that the E-Commerce Directive is inapplicable in The Pirate Bay case because it’s not simply transmitting data the way an ISP does. The Pirate Bay is actually involved in the communication between downloaders, he said. To support his claim Roswall compared the site to an electronic bulletin board where interaction between users and moderators is enabled this placing it outside the directive.
Next in line, IFPI’s Peter Danowsky had the ridiculous suggestion that since every download must be counted as a lost sale (!) 6.5 Euro should be paid for each downloaded album. But he didn’t stop here – oh, no, he added that The Pirate Bay must be forced to pay an additional fine for the damaged the file sharing site brought to the music industry in general.
Henrik Pontén supported his predecessor in his claims saying that The Pirate Bay had a clear commercial purpose right from the start “It was probably Sweden’s best-known brand at the time.”
Finally Monique Wadste made the same assumptions and claims on behalf of the movie industry.
Just keeping you up to date with what's going on.
