Four representatives of the openly resilient and infamous BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, were brought to court in Stockholm, Sweden, mid-February by a collection of intellectual property owners. The prosecution included groups like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau. This trial will mark the first time that The Pirate Bay, as large and popular as it has been since indexing and databasing miscellaneous torrent files since late 2003, or its defendants have represented the company in a court of law, Swedish or American.

The prosecution sought to prove that The Pirate Bay defendants have supported their users in copyright infringement of intellectual property. Over the course of fifteen days, the arguments and evidence of both sides have been heard, and some of them were far-fetched and unreal. Following the first day, the prosecution made the decision to drop half of the charges brought against The Pirate Bay representatives, leaving only one allegation to the court: the assistance in making copyright content available. Their arguments regarding this specific allegation relied on the evidence of screenshots of torrents hosted on The Pirate Bay websites, mishandled exhibits of the technology that BitTorrent relies on, and the misunderstanding of how this technology works and The Pirate Bay's role in it. The exhibits included torrent files that the prosecution failed to prove were either used or relative to The Pirate Bay's database, and one witness from the prosecution, an ex-police officer turned investigator, directly admitted that the download of copyright content happened outside and separate from The Pirate Bay.

Meanwhile, the defendants (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundström, and Gottfrid Svartholm) had spent their time discrediting the prosecution's arguments by challenging the opposed party's knowledge on BitTorrent technology, their evidence's authenticity, and each defendant refused to identify each other as the website's lead administrator, considering themselves equals doing work on a need-to-do basis. But what is memorable from the defendant's arguments is a session that is now considered the “King Kong” defense.
Carl Lundstrom's lawyer, Per E Samuelsson, took the initiative and explained to the judge that the defendants do not upload torrent files to their database, that its users are the ones assisting in copyright infringement, and continued further in arguing that these users are physically identifiable people like, for example, the user by the name of King Kong. Samuelsson then reminded the judge that, “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.”

Following numerous sessions, representations of sales lost, conflicting arguments on the effects of piracy in the movie and recording industries, the court closed the case on March 3, leaving the judge to present a verdict on April 17. Whether or not the judge will find the law in favor for or against The Pirate Bay is unclear, although representatives from both sides are confident. In my opinion, this case will only affect the law concerning intellectual properties in the internet age, but it probably won't have a large effect on internet piracy as a whole. The anonymous commentary to this trial often shows a common claim, which is that if one of these databases is forced to cease operations, more will take its place in response; such a claim is example for this culture's resilience.

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I'm going to close the post up with a brief respectful look to an unexpected stowaway that was found aboard space shuttle Discovery earlier this week. Shortly before the launch of Discovery this past Sunday, a free-tailed bat had been spotted clinging onto the shuttle's orange external fuel tank. NASA was able to find the bat using high-resolution cameras viewing Discovery through launch procedure. Wildlife experts on-site had come to the conclusion by viewing the video feeds that the bat was injured and unable to fly, which made efforts to scare or shoo the bat away useless as countdown approached. Needless to say, the bat (now being called “Space Bat”) was in for one final, extreme flight of its life, leaving this world in more ways than one, both a sad and beautiful thing. Who knows, maybe it's dream was to reach for the stars, only God knows why.
NASA's commentary on the bat's fate was a clean “it's dead,” but Gizmodo appears to have done the bat some justice with a beautiful eulogy in this creature's memory. Also, a random and spectacular video dedication can be viewed below:

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Godspeed Space Bat, may you fly among the stars forever.