Peter Sunde has been with The Pirate Bay from the beginning, through the court case, and the acquisition.  Sunde said that he wants to step down because he wants to concentrate on new things including several projects and authoring a book.  After The Global Gaming Factory decided to buy out The Pirate Bay, that leaves little for Sunde left to do.

“I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read,” stated Sunde in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Back in September 2008, Sunde was revealed he was working on a project that involves the Amazon.com Kindle.  Perhaps he may work on that project once again.  Shortly after that blog post, The Pirate Bay had to deal with all sorts of litigation that required Sunde’s attention.

Good luck, Sunde.  Torrent users are indebted to you.

A couple of days after The Pirate Bay team decided to appeal the verdict comes the news about the connection between the judge of the trial and copyright organizations.  On a Swedish radio station, the judge denied a “conflict of interest” when it was found out that he was a member of the main copyright association in the country.

The radio station is called Sveriges Radio and it is the equivalent of the BBC in Sweden.  Judge Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and is even on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.  That organization focuses on tougher copyright laws.

Last Friday the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement.  The judge denied his conflict of interest over what is considered the most high-profile trial revolving around filesharing in European history.  The four co-founders were asked to pay $3.6 million in damages and serve a one year sentence.

The defense lawyers for the four co-founders will be calling for a retrial.  “I will point that out in my appeal, then the court of appeal will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” stated Peter Althin, the lawyer for Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

Ever since the verdict was decided on Friday, the Swedish Pirate Party membership has more than doubled.  This may give the party a chance to win a seat in the European Parliament.  Over 22,000 members joined the party since the verdict.   Now there are over 37,000 total members.

The Pirate Party organization focuses on copyright law regulation and they keep a close eye on the government.  The party gained some attention last September when they found out the Bavarian and German governments were developing a trojan horse that would intercept calls made on Skype.

[via Guardian/Wired]

One of the lawyers for The Pirate Bay team has already filed for an appeal to a decision that was made this past Friday.  The decision was that the team would be expected to sentence one year in prison and pay a fine that is worth $3.6 million in damages.  Lawyers for the other three defendants in the case are also expected to appeal.

The four members of The Pirate Bay team are Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde.  Stefan Jevinger, one of Carl’s lawyers stated that the appeal was made to make a statement about how wrong the sentence was.

According to the written appeal, the lawyers are pointing out that the decision had not shown that Lundström knew about the main crime which was being an accessory to copyright law.  You cannot be sentenced to a crime you don’t know about states the appeal.

The appeal is expected to be heard by the court of appeals sometime in the first half of next year.  “This is a bit more complicated than your ordinary bank robbery, and therefore it will take time,” stated Wag’s lawyer Ola Salomonsson.

Until everything is sorted out, The Pirate Bay website will remain online.  For full Pulse 2.0 coverage on The Pirate Bay, check out http://pulse2.com/category/the-pirate-bay/.

“I would rather burn that money than give it to them.”

This Friday a court in Stockholm will make a ruling on whether the four men involved in the creation and maintenance of The Pirate Bay will be charged for copyright violation.  The Pirate Bay is used to download torrents, a cluster of files that are downloaded by groups of people using the BitTorrent platform.  The RIAA and MPAA basically are the enemies of The Pirate Bay and pushed for the lawsuit against the service.  The Pirate Bay does not actually host any copyright files on their own servers.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstrom are the guys behind The Pirate Bay.  The Pirate Bay has about 22 million people using their service.  Prosecutors want the four people involved in THe Pirate Bay to do one year of time and they also want $14.3 million in compensation.  The compensation would be paid to MGM, Colombia PIctures, 20th Century Fox Films, Universal, EMI, and Sony BMG.

“I would rather burn that money than give it to them,” stated Sunde.

If the four are charged, it would also put Google in the hot seat as well.  YouTube hosts many copyrighted videos but are willing to comply with removal.  The main difference between Google and The Pirate Bay is the attitude of the people behind the websites according to Andre Rickardsson, a former investigator of the Swedish security police.  When companies ask to have music or videos removed from The Pirate Bay, the e-mails are posted with an explicit response from The Pirate Bay.

On the second day of the trial, 50% of the charges were dropped against The Pirate Bay team due to weak evidence.

I suppose the moral of the story here is a little niceness can go a long way.  If you’re going to distribute copyright material, at least be Mr. Nice Guy about it when you are given a DMCA notice.

[via SacBee]

“Is the Colonel’s underwear a matter of national security?”  That is my favorite line from the movie, A Few Good Men.  Tom Cruise’s wittiness in that movie reminds me of the wittiness used by the lawyer for The Pirate Bay during this potentially long and arduous trial.  The third day of the trial ended early just like yesterday’s day of the trial.  Yesterday 50% of the charges were dropped because of the prosecution’s lack of the ability to properly explain what BitTorrent was.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) used an argument that damages caused by The Pirate Bay offering The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” through a torrent should be 10 times the damage since the music is available anywhere else online.  The Pirate Bay doesn’t have the funds and cannot pay the damages for offering that song even though Peter Danowsky stated that The Pirate Bay is “organized crime on a grand scale” and netted “significant revenus” from various sources of advertising.

“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me,” stated The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde on Twitter.  Peter Danowsky said that even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t have all that money, they can pay a lot of it anyway.

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” stated Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson.  “According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.”  Lundström’s company provides technical services to The Pirate Bay.  After this statement the court adjourned.

Sunde later reported on Twitter that after the court was adjourned, “We had some pizza after todays episode of #spectrial. Met the whole oposing side and asked if they could pick up the check. They refused .”

Today is only the second day in the trial against The Pirate Bay.  The Pirate Bay is a search engine website that allows people to search for .torrent files.  Torrent files contain a link to download all sorts of files including music, movies, and software.  For the non-tech savvy, think of it as a modern day Napster, but its not just music.  Prosecutor Håkan Roswall, did not adequately explain the function of DHT.  DHT allows for trackerless torrents so it does not necessarily mean that the screenshots they have provided as evidence belongs to The Pirate Bay’s tracker.

Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) asked Roswall to explain how BitTorrent actually works.  The prosecution misunderstood the technology and told the court that his evidence does not adequately show that The Pirate Bay’s trackers were used.  Roswall had to drop all charges that relate to “assisting copyright infringement.”  Now the remaining charges are simply “assisting making available.”

“EPIC WINNING LOL,” stated Peter Althin, a lawyer representing The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

[via TorrentFreak]

A few Swedish book publishers have came together because they believe a lot of their books are being pillaged on The Pirate Bay.  The book publishers have stated that about 85% of all of the best selling books in Sweden are on The Pirate Bay.  Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay stated that it’s a bit sad that it’s not 100%.

To find out the statistic of the number of best selling books on The Pirate Bay, the publishers created an illegal specialized code that would scrape The Pirate Bay’s torrent database since there wasn’t another way to find out besides searching for each book manually.  The Pirate Bay owns the copyright to their database of torrents.  And the book publishers violated The Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy. 

Sunde stated that he called up the book publishers to find out more about the code that they implemented to find out the book download statistics so he can send them an invoice.  If they don’t pay up, Sunde plans on taking them to court.  Sunde is also currently planning a new project that may involve the Amazon.com Kindle.

Peter Sunde is one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s leading torrent sharing websites.  Sunde recently wrote in a blog post:

I’m looking for someone who can sponsor me with an Amazon Kindle! It’s not possible to buy the device from Europe and it’s super expensive to use mailing dropboxes in the US.

Do anyone wanna help me out? I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…

Sunde also linked to a blog post written by Martin J. Thörnkvist.  Thörnkvist ranted about how businesses don’t learn from other businesses.  This includes the music industry not learning from the newspaper industry.  And also includes how the movie industry is not learning from the music industry.  “The printed word is not safe from digitization,” wrote Thörnkvist.

Is The Pirate Bay co-founder working on a new e-book project?  He stated that he’ll tell anyone that sponsors him with a Kindle, including Wired.

“Earlier this week the Swedish stasi-government decided – against the peoples wishes – to wiretap all internet and telephone traffic in order to protect Sweden against threats,” wrote Peter Sunde, founder of The Pirate Bay on his blog. “As you all know, being a neutral country makes Sweden a target for all the terrorists of the world, apparantly.”

The Swedish parliament have pushed a wiretapping law that forces ISPs to monitor phone calls and Internet traffic without court order requirements.  Clearly this law has pissed off The Pirate Bay.  The Pirate Bay is calling upon international ISPs to block Sweden from being able to use the Internet.  The Pirate Bay has even put up wanted posters of the Swedish politicians that pushed for the law.

The Pirate Bay will even start implementing cryptographic secure socket layers (SSL) on their site and write how to safeguard the privacy of Sweidsh users.  For Swedish users, The Pirate Bay has set up a VPN.

For those who do not know what The Pirate Bay is, they are a torrent search engine that runs on the BitTorrent, or P2P protocol.  BitTorrent distributes data between peers that prevents the original distributor from having to incur heavy hardware, hosting, and bandwidth support.  Revision3 uses the BitTorrent protocol to make their videos high quality.

[Source: TorrentFreak]