This article is more than 1 year old

Pirate Bay appeal finally drops anchor in court

Timbers to be shivered next week

The Pirate Bay appeal will finally have its day in court next week, nearly a year and a half on from the high-profile trial that saw the four operators of the notorious BitTorrent site hit with a guilty verdict.

The Svea Court of Appeal in Sweden will hear the appeal from Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's defence lawyers on 28 September.

According to a statement from the court, the hearing is expected to continue through to 15 October and will be overseen by several judges, including Court of Appeals Judge Christina Boutz.

Meanwhile, TPB mouthpiece Sunde, AKA BrokeP – who currently resides in Germany – has been busily pressing flesh with certain news outlets about his latest web project, Flattr, which is a Web2.0-inspired micro payment system.

He revealed to us earlier this year that he hoped The Pirate Bay site would fade away, paving the way for new technology to swipe copyrighted material from under the noses of the “big, bad” music industry.

BrokeP also complained about Sweden’s appeals’ court timing the hearing after last Sunday's general election, which saw TPB supporter the Pirate Party fail to secure a single seat in parliament.

“There are still issues that need to be resolved before a court date can be set for the hearing. The EU has to say that the eCommerce Directive is not applicable on TPB's case, which is a long process and the court has to wait for it. We're also waiting for the bias of one of the judges in the case to be solved as well,” Sunde said in an exclusive interview with The Register in April this year.

“Despite all that we're confident we will win the appeal. If we don’t there’ll be another appeal. So it’s not really important, only from a political point of view.

“As for the fines, the Swedish courts don’t have jurisdiction because the servers aren’t in that country now and nor are we.”

He told us as the time that Neij and Svartholm Warg were somewhere in Asia, but declined to comment on the location of Lundström, who has a murky past with alleged connections to a gang of skinheads that attacked Latin American tourists in Stockholm in the mid-1980s.

If the four men see their appeal thrown out by the Svea Court, they each face one-year prison sentences and fines of 30 million kronor (£2.8m), following last year’s verdict that found them guilty of being accessories to breaching copyright laws.

It’s not clear if Sunde, Neij, Svartholm Warg and Lundström will be present in court next week. El Reg asked BrokeP to give us his thoughts on the appeal, but he declined to return comment. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like