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Day 4 of The Pirate Bay trial has seen the focus on Fredrik who was questioned at length. When it was movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted’s turn, she wasted no time in unexpectedly introducing new evidence. Both the defense and the court complained at this point, with Wadsted choosing to shout down the judge. Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began the day by again referencing the case in Finland against the administrators of Finreactor. Fredrik’s lawyer Jonas Nilsson requested a copy of the case notes for the defense. It seems comparisons of the two cases will be drawn by the prosecution later in the trial. Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson continued with his client’s defense, reiterating the weakness of the links between him and the other defendants, and The Pirate Bay operation as a whole. Samuelsson also pointed to Lundström’s email correspondence in 2005 with Gottfrid and Fredrik, where they discussed the possibility of having to move the site to another country. This, he said, was an indication that the defendants kept an eye on the changes in the law and were mindful that they should operate legally within it. In the meantime, it came to the court’s attention that Tobias Andersson, a future witness in the case, was sitting in the court. He was asked to leave the room, with permission to continue listening on the audio feed next door. He will testify later on. After a break, the court’s attention switched to Fredrik Neij (TiAMO). The court heard that Fredrik was never a member of Piratbyran and he had no ideological motivation to join TPB. Instead, Fredrik was attracted to the site by the BitTorrent technology. He joined to “..play with The Pirate Bay, just as I wanted,” he said. The defense said that Fredrik was always mindful of the law and had a desire to operate within it, consulting lawyers to ensure his activities were legal. In a reference to companies like MediaDefender, Fredrik noted that “anti-p2p companies access our tracker and manipulate our statistics.” He said that although a torrent may have only been uploaded once, these anti-p2p activities inflate the stats on the tracker to indicate that more transfers took place than in reality. Fredrik was then questioned about his relationship with advertiser Oded Daniel. When the prosecution asked if Oded was involved in the technical aspects of TPB, Fredrik replied.. “No, he’s not good at that. He uses Windows, so…” There was laughter heard on the live audio feed after that remark, not from the court room, but from the listening lounge next door where the bloggers are situated. Fredrik was asked about the significance of the site’s name, but shrugged and repeated that his interest is merely in the technology. Fredrik was further questioned by Håkan Roswall, with the Prosecutor pointing out that during his police interview, Fredrik admitted that there may be links to copyright works on TPB. Fredrik said he knew about these due to the legal complaints the site received, noting that the complaints referred only to inapplicable US laws. He went on to deny having received any of these personally, but while he admitted he saw them he denied creating any of the infamous responses. Roswall asked Fredrik if he had ever been a seeder on the site. Fredrik admitted to seeding torrents but noted that he only did this with copyright-free material. When questioned about the situation that some torrents are removed from the site due to bad labeling it was noted that TPB site is uncensored, with thousands of new torrents added every day and it is an impossible task to review them all. The tracker is completely open and anyone can and does add to it regularly, completely without any input or correspondence with TPB staff. Just before lunch, Monique Wadsted for the movie companies took over questioning Fredrik. After a discussion over the way emails are handled at The Pirate Bay, out of the blue she began to introduce new evidence which had not previously been disclosed to the defense, in what is being viewed as an attempt to unsettle Fredrik. She asked about Fredrik’s connections to other torrent sites, OscarTorrents and EurovisionTorrents and he denied being personally connected to them. Noting the breach of protocol, the judge asked if it was acceptable for the court to be considering evidence that was not already presented pre-trial. Monique Wadsted tried to shout down the judge, but that didn’t really help much. The court then took a break. After the lunch break IFPI’s lawyer Peter Danowsky continues Fredrik’s questioning. He tries to pin something on him, but Fredrik points out that the email he’s referring to is a reply, and that the quotes mean that he didn’t write that part of the email. Fredrik’s lawyer is next up to ask questions, and the prosecution is being educated on open trackers, the BitTorrent swarms and the fact that torrent files can be distributed through other means than the TPB, like email of FTP. Then the Prosecutor handed over a printed page from TPB and said: “This is a print out from a part of your web page. You call this a screenshot?” Fredrik answered: “This isn’t a screenshot, just a printed page.” Fredrik then explains what’s on the print (a Pink Panther torrent), and how the upload process on TPB works. Next it’s Gottfrid’s turn to answer questions. The prosecution emphasizes on the financial part, and specifically the link with Oded. When asked if Gottfrid is in charge of ad sales he answered: “No, I tried to get away from that because of time issues. I had a business to run before you came and took it all away.” The prosecution further questioned Gottfrid about moderation issues, replies to copyright holders and his involvement in developing the site. The prosecutor pushed hard on whether Peter Sunde has worked on the layout and graphics for the site. “To my knowledge, he is neither designer nor graphic artists,” Gottfried replied. Wadsted later asked Gottfrid how they handle torrents that (allegedly) link to child porn. He said that they would inform the police. She then asked if they removed those torrents. He said some. “Not all?” was Wadsted’s reply. Gottfrid explained that it is not up to them to investigate crimes, but that they do inform the police. “We can’t do investigations of our own. And if the police says we should remove a torrent, we will,” he said. Gottfrid further said that says Peter Sunde has nothing to do with technical administration, design, layout, ad sales or any hands-on stuff with the site. He’s just been a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay. “Neither me or Neij work well in furnished rooms. Peter was better on the verbal issues and media,” he said.
"Shouting down the judge", that must be a new technique taught at the music industries law school. I doubt it will impress many people though.
