Um pequeno resumo em português

Sentados na mesa da esquerda para a direita estavam Rasmus Fleischer e Sara Sajjad do Piracy Office, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) e Magnus Eriksson do Piracy Office. Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) e o 4º acusado Carl Lundström não estavam na mesa.

A conferência começou com a afirmação de todo o caso em julgamento pode ser descrito como uma peça de teatro e que todas as pessoas nele envolvidas são actores potenciais. Juraram que fariam dele um reality-show, tendo o prólogo já começado através de Rasmus. É um Spec-Trial (espectáculo-julgamento), e estão contentes por nele participarem. Assim que as câmaras fotográficas pararam, o painel aceitou perguntas dos media presentes.

O Pirate Bay disse que sentem que o caso em julgamento não terminará rapidamente, pois implica recursos legais e como desafio disseram que aconteça o que acontecer a cada um dos acusados, o sitío "The Pirate Bay" continuará a funcionar. "O que vão eles fazer? Já falharam uma vez em tentar encerrá-lo. Deixá-los falhar outra vez" disse Gottfrid. Não é o sítio "TPB" que está a ser julgado sublinhou Peter Sunde. Esse tem vida própria sem nós, disse.

O Pirate Bay disse que apesar de enfrentarem pedidos de indemnização astronómicos, não vão ficar intimidados por isso, tendo Gottfrid declarado, "Já tenho mais dívidas na Suécia que nunca conseguirei pagar". E continuou "Não interessa se pedem vários milhões ou um milhar de milhões. Não somos ricos e não temos dinheiro para pagar. Não verão um cêntimo."

Quando questionado sobre se o download de media sem pagar era correcto, Peter desconsiderou a questão por não ser interessante e que estava cansado de a ouvir.

Outra questão foi achada mais interessante: Ve-se como acusado, ou defensor da tecnologia?
Peter respondeu "Penso que é algo intermédio. Temos uma responsabilidade pessoal nisto, um risco pessoal que tem algum impacto no que sentimos. Mas não é por defendermos a tecnologia, mas mais defender a ideia da tecnologia e isso é talvez o mais importante neste caso - o aspecto político de deixar a tecnologia ser livre e não ser controlado por uma entidade que não gosta de tecnologia.

Gottfrid acrescentou que o acusador do caso está demasiado focado nos indivíduos acusados. Pelo menos 1/4 das provas é assassínio do carácter pessoal das pessoas envolvidas", disse.

Peter continuou explicando que quando foi preso a polícia não começou imediatamente a questioná-lo sobre o site, mas qual era a sua motivação. Quando fui depor pela única vez perante a polícia estes perguntaram-lhe se queria explicar a sua ideologia política, não se estava envolvido no TPB.

As finanças também foram abordadas, tendo Peter and Gottfrid que começaram o site  e continua a funcionar graças às receitas de publicidade, e nenhum deles ganha dinheiro com isso.

Um repórter da BBC perguntou quais são os custos de manutenção do "The Pirate Bay". Peter respondeu que não sabia o valor preciso. Que usam muita largura de banda e que tinham de comprar novos servidores quase todas as semanas.

Gottfrid disse que o só o Tracker usa uma média de 600mbits que aumenta muito aos fins de semana. Revelou também que o hardware necessário tem de ser substituído uma vez por ano e que vale actualmente ceca de $120.000, desvalorizando cerca de $10.000 por mês.

No final da conferência foi perguntado como avaliam a maneira como a imprensa os tratou.

"Bom, essa é uma pergunta muito interessante", disse Peter. "Existem jornalistas de quem não gostamos e por isso não os convidamos hoje e eles ficaram furiosos connosco". Peter não referiu nomes, mas foram Aftonbladet, Metro e TV4.

Explicou também qual era o problema com essas publicações. "Estão apenas interessados em dizerem algo de espectacular em vez de discutirem os problemas em questão. Os media não convidados hoje são basicamente os media que não foram negativos, que mentiram e esconderam informação do público que os usa."

Não temos nenhum prolema com o jornalismo negativo, continuou Peter. Há muitas pessoas nesta sala que não gosta de nós e não queremos saber disso para nada, desde que discutam os problemas em causa. MAs quero acrescentar que a maioria da imprensa foi-nos favorável, discutindo cada vez mais os problemas reais à volta da questão TPB em vez de se focarem em nós enquanto indivíduos, sendo precisamente esta última tendência que queremos evitar.

A provocação final de Peter foi:

" Não acredito que TPB será importante nos próximos 5 anos. Mas penso que a tecnologia BitTorrent melhorará. A partilha de ficheiros existirá sempre. As pessoas estão cansadas desse debate."

A Conferência de Imprensa (em inglês)

Today The Pirate Bay hosted a press conference about their upcoming trial (which starts tomorrow) at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. The transcript is not perfect, but gives a good idea.

0.26.00
Q. Where is Fredrik?
I hope no one really expected Fredrik to be here.. Noon on a Sunday?

Q. How big is TPB today?
Well..  about half of the BT traffic is coordinate through TPB, and it is extreme amounts.About half of the worlds Internet traffic is expected to be BT traffic,and about half of it is tracked by TPB. That should be roughly just about 40% of all Internet traffic in the world is somewhat depending on TPB.

Q. How much data are we talking about here?
I cant even begin to estimate it, we have no figures of that.. It’s, It’s a lot. More than I can store at home.
Last weekend TPB was down during a couple of hours and we can see graphs of this.. that about 108 Tb of data was missing from the Swedish Internet. That’s quite a lot during 5 hours.

Q. Why was TPB down?
Probably for the same reason Fredrik is not here today.. someone was drunk.

Q. Who are you guys?

Rasmus Fleischer (of Piratbyrån), Sara Sajjad (of Piratbyrån), Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), Peter Sunde (aka Brokep), Magnus Eriksson (of Piratbyrån) and me Marcin de Kaminski.
Theres a difference from other Press confernces, we have nothing we want to get out, but were expecting media to be interested in this.. more like press get-together than a press conference.

Q. how many users do you have right now?
mm. 25 million is my guesstimate, between 22 and 25 million users right now, at this moment.User is defined as an ongoing up or download.

Q. Are there any plans to change file sharing technology due to the recent changes/systems (law) such as FRA or IPRED?
Eh. we don’t believe in that. To reverse the progress, to hide. we want to bring it up front, this is what people want to do. We want to help people do that, not help them hide… confront the desicion makers with: “this is how it is”
The total amount of File share traffic is so absurd there is no way to centrally monitor it in any way.

31.05 Q. Do you have any thought on how artists should be compensated?
In this panel we have two people who have been earning their money as programmers, one active musician…Piratbyrån is actively participating in discussion in different areas, music, art etc. and those discussions are good. On the other hand to start a discussion saying theres an awful lot of files being transferred and how do we get compensated for that is the wrong way to start. Selling single files is a boring way for doing business leading to boring culture. One file, one sale is not what we believe in, we believe the digital needs to tie back into the analog world to become meaningful.
What we have seen from 2000’s when file sharing has grown in popularity is that the music business in all ways, except physical media sales, is  blooming. Other areas will follow this development as long as business models adapt to the new reality.

Q. What would a conviction of TPB lead to (all instances)?
Eh.. nothing.
What could they do, they have failed to bring TPB down once, and they are welcome to fail again.
It is important to note that it is not TPB that is on trial, it is people who are affiliated with TPB who are entering this political trial. Its not about the juridical things, it’s about politics. TPB is not a person that’s why we are involved instead. TPB on the other hand has a life of it’s own, and won’t be affected by what happens in our lives.
I want to add something, a conviction wont bring down TPB. On the other hand.. the plan from the lobby, such as IFPI, following a conviction is to drive to implement the Internet censorship what many countries have already experienced. To force ISP’s to filter the publics Internet access and block TPB. This is what they would want to motivate following a conviction. An interesting point to make, this won’t stop file sharing. Denmark has already implemented this type of filtering, but the BT traffic has remained on the same level.
I even think the traffic from Denmark increased following the block
The scary thing about such a development is that TPB wont be the first to end up on such a list. When you have such a list, more names will appear, and that’s politics.

34.42Q. Is TPB (or Gottfrid and Fredrik) intimidated by the claims (damages) that has been raised against them?
Short answer, NoWhy not?There is no ground for them, it doesn’t matter if they ask for 1 million, 116 million or even the talk about a billion.. They won’t get anything anyway no matter the result of the trial.None of us is rich, and there is basically no money to be collected.If we had money we would rather give it away than giving it to the industry we don’t like.
Personally, I already have debts in Sweden then I will ever be able to pay back, I don’t even live in Sweden. They’re welcome to send me a bill, I’ll put it in a frame and hang it on the wall.

Q. Will the claims (damages) be a part of the trial?
We.. out lawyers have tried to separate the claims from the other content of the trial. Stockholm’s court has declined this twice.We think its strange to discuss claims before anyone is convicted.The trial is a combined civil and crime case because it is the only way for the lobby to get discussion about claims in there in the first place.
The damage claims themselves are consists of (this much paper)..And half the trial will be spend discussing “if someone gets convicted, what should they pay”. It will be interesting since studies show that these companies make money of file sharing. They should really be suing us to give us money instead.

Q. Question on how we look the rule of law and how it may be affected in case someone is convicted.
I think that the worst thing about the trial is that, especially young people have lost their trust for the Swedish judicial system. It’s a  the sad thing that the rule of law (perception thereof) gets a blow.

Q. Is TPB good business?
Eh.. I don’t think so at all..Many people wonder if we make a lot of money from this. Take into consideration; Someone starts a site that consumes enormous amounts of bandwidth, there is no way to make money from the tracker itself that everyone use, that itself cost most of the money. An then to publicly suggest, to some of the most (capital)solid industries of the world to shove a baton up their ass and to recommend different types of batons for this purpose. No it’s not a good way to make money.

Q. How is TPB maintained then?
By the banners (ads) on the site.

Q. (not heard)There are 25 million users of the tracker, and through the tracker it’s impossible to display ads over the tracker. The largest service TPB provides is the tracker itself. It’s free and there are no ads involved. Anyone can use it even if they don’t upload the file to TPB.

I want to add that TPB is really cheap, in terms of ad-costs, the price  is, I guess about 1/1000 of the cost to publish an ad on Aftonbladet.se. This is because the website is controversial and theres no way to sell expensive ads. And as a consequence if some serious advertises comes along IFPI or the anti-piracy bureau will give them a call and tell them they will sue, just like they did to newspapers that linked to thepiratebay.org.It’s really hard..
Just a quick note, there is a need to differentiate between thepiratebay.org website and the tracker itself. Anyone can set up a web page that use the tracker, many torrent sites does this. They don’t have to deal with the cost of the tracker.

Q. Are there any figures on how much money TPB earns?
We don’t know that, all of that stuff is managed by another company they also pay our bills. We’re not interested in dealing with it, so we let another company do it.

Q. About the trial and the prosecutor’s attitude to it ..
The prosecutor, and this is my personal opinion, is stupid. And I think gottfrid has an appropriate expression for it, a clown.And he doesn’t know how to count either, he must have quit school early. If you look at the figures from the preliminary investigation it’s quite easy to see that we have earned, I think it is 800K (sek) under 3-3,5 years and it’s not a lot of money. The project has been loosing money during tis period. We’re not really interested in the discussion about money, the interesting thin about TPB is the purpose it fulfills. You are all here today not because TPB may have made money or not but because TPB has had an effect on the world in a very unique way. Ina very simple way, by using the Internet. This is what is interesting.

Q. What evidence does the prosecutor have against TPB?
The thing is.. evidence?.. It sound’s like we are doing something illegal. We don’t. I think is hard to day there is evidence against TPB. What is it they are trying to prove? It’s an odd question, TPB is a legal site, legal file sharing system, there’s nothing illegal about it. the prosecutor is put under pressure by the department of justice to do something.
The raid needs to be seen in context that the prosecutor appeared at my company PRQ about a month earlier and took down (xxx) another known website that had previously been shut down in three countries and attacked by Russian secret service, (xxx) is the tjetjen rebel’s official news channel.. The rebels have been supplying interviews with the leaders etc. and it has been bothering Russia. When they came to my company they have filed to bring it down trough technical means and when they got the prosecutor to bring it down juridically I put it back up after a day. The prosecutor and I are not exactly the best of friends.
It seems the prosecutor holds aggression towards Piratbyrån and TPB, has has compared us to IRA’s Sinn Fein. In this light the raid seems not only juridical, because he holds both personal and political grudge against us.
Correction, this is what he said: if Piratbyrån is like IRA then TPB is like their armed wing. Which is interesting since IRA is the armed wing of Sinn Fein.
He compared us to an armed wing of an armed wing, I wonder if this means that TPB is like an atom bomb or something.

Q. Are there any new business models arising, how does TPB look upon them and how are people producing culture going to make their living?
Let me answer briefly first. How are creative people going to support themselves and their families? How have these people been doing it before? If someone got the task to investigate this for any arbitrary year in history it would require a very very thorough investigation. Never before has there been a single model that did the trick.There were in the 90’s a sort of dream to build a digital economy where you would sell files. This crashed together with the IT(dot-com) bubble.Historically creative, performing people have had a number of ways to support themselves, to make their money. Besides I hope that most of the people here are considering themselves to be creative people. What makes the category creative people?
Many of us in this panel are creative people who provide for themselves by being.. creative. But maybe not by selling plastic discs or selling software in fancy looking boxes.
Besides, Internet is not the only place where creative people should make their money. In Sweden we have a cultural policy, just revised, maybe we can ask that policy the same question, how are creative people going to provide for themselves? It’s not only TPB’s fault these people are starving, or whatever it is.
Historically immaterial rights are new, in Sweden we have had it for.. 100 years? And I don’t think anyone here says that Mozart or Beethoven had.. they possible had problems providing for them selves from time to time, but they still produced work of arts.
The tape recorder, when it was introduced about 60 years ago this question was raised. Do we forbid tape recorders, STIM demanded they should not be permitted. A quite comparable situation.
When the self-paying pianos came along they said live music would die.

Q. Why do you think it is OK to download music, movies or games without paying for it?
Let’s have a couple of different answers to it, we don’t agree.
I think the question is uninteresting. It’s not eh cost.. I’m tired of the question how do people get paid for their creative work. Because it also means that If someone sits down, and produce something they should only have to sit on their but an wait for the money to start rolling in and I don’t think it has ever worked that way. I think people imagines this is how the industry has worked. Something has happened so that the corporations that have been taking money off the artists needs to change, to share more with the originators.
Copying is the essence of culture. If we are on the dance floor and Peter makes a fresh move that I copy he won’t ask me why I didn’t pay him before I did it. And this is how culture works. Copying.
I, I don’t see the copyright (immaterial right) as some sort of moral right. The motives for copyright is a utilitaristic construction, that our society should benefit from giving creators a limited monopoly. And this is something I dislike. From my view I really don’t like state-sanctioned policies leading to artificial monopolies.
As you see we don’t have common line or policy, we don’t preach about how things should be. Piratbyrån is an ongoing discussion, we all have different entry points, experiences and personal preferences. The common thing is we think there’s a discussion leading nowhere and we want to have(live/perform) this discussion in another tone, leading to a better act.
There are ongoing discussions regarding new ways to support an economy around the digital area, not limited to it, but around it. Coming from the we, it starts to integrate into media and the industry but the parties on the prosecutors side of this trial does not take part in this discussion. If you attend conferences where these new ideas are being discussed,web-sweden is there, media-sweden is there but these companies are not. They are not participating, instead they’re saying there’s no way to compete with free (as in getting sth. for nothing)
We work, on a daily basis.. take Peter as an example. He works on an office in Malmö that he shares with a music label that are our friends.It’s not so damned strange, theres only a handful corporations that happens to be very big that has choose not to participate, they’ve ceased thinking.
But, my question, you wanted a concrete answer as to why people download.. and I assume you mean copyrighted material..You can’t not do it. To.. you can’t get an answer to a question that is not a question. Like, you cant ask why it is OK to download if there is no option not to. There’s no not to copy.
To me this question is like.. Forbid wearing blue shirts and then asking why we think it is OK to wear blue shirts.

Q. (in the trial) Is your line that a toolmaker cannot be convicted because a crime is committed using the tool.
I don’t know how smart it is to discuss strategies one day before the trial.The trial will contain many different strategies on how you can look at these things. The prosecutor and Monique (MPA lawyer) are very sure about their thing, getting us convicted. That we will be put in prison and what not. It is a spectacle, and we have to play as well and a drama will be more interesting if there’s more than one story in it.

Q. If TPB is convicted in court are you personally liable?
Yes.TPB does not exist as a juridical person, juridical entity. And even if it did, in Sweden a corporation cannot commit crimes and still have a limited liability.It would probably be a civil case if we had a company or organization but instead it is a criminal lawsuit.

53.00 Q. What will file sharing look like in 5-6 years and will it be a hot topic?
In 5 years I don’t think TPB will still be here as a major actor and we hope it wont. I think file sharing, it’s always been there but it depend on what you define file sharing to be. When you send an e-mail you are file sharing, when you talk to someone on MSN you are file sharing. If you mean file sharing of large files over some sort of network, which I assume you do I think the technology will improve. I think the discussion around file sharing is unnecessary, it’s nothing we can decide if we are going to have it or not, it’s always going to be there. People will grow tired of the discussion and like most people in our world we are getting confused that we need a press conference to talk about these things, to us it is obvious. We don’t talk so much about file sharing anymore, we talk about the benefit of access. It’s really another discussion than the one about file sharing.
File sharing has always been performed in a number of different channels, and it’s still like that. You don’t think so often about it but offline file sharing has a significant importance and as the size of storage media grows we are coming at a point where you can carry around all music ever released in your pocket and copy it to another pocket. At this point the discussion about being pro file sharing or against is irrelevant. So what can we do with it? To talk about building networks where people can meet and refine their taste is more interesting than  carrying around files in your pocket and exchange them with a single friend.
Exactly, today there are a number of techniques, improving the method for physically distributing material. The real problem is indexing and channeling. But generally is is impossible to say what will happen in 5 years. When I, 5.5 years ago bought a Gig extra memory and installed a poor beta version of a tracker software on a computer in the basement  at my former job I could not predict that I would be here five years later.

Q. When has the pirate bay achieved its goal? re: the pirate bay have changed the world
there is no goal, we have no strategy we achieve a goal each time a byte is transfered over the trackerThat may be the goal, to help people exchange the information they wantwe don’t want to be the largest tracker, we have repeatedly encouraged others to start competitive trackers. There is no end in itself to be the one and only tracker.
We have a common attitude, kopimi, copy us, we don’t want to define a goal and recruit people to help us get there. were only part of something bigger and are asking everyone to do it better

Q. Physical devices, would there be any without the pirate bay or what would be their use…
someone calculated what it would cost to fill a 20Gb iPod with records legally. astronomical figures.
we should remember that charges were put forward to prohibit mp3 playing devices when they arrived on the market.

Q. Can the pirate bay guarantee to live on after a potential conviction?
Depend on how you define the pirate bay? TPB has no juridical body.But, yes, TPB can guarantee it will live on.
This process will take 3-5 years, in 5 years I don’t think bittorrent will be ‘hot’ anymore, personally I am surprised BT is till on top

Q. Whats going on with the secure p2P file transfer project?
It’s really a question for Fredrik, hes not here today. It’s his project.There’s an open discussion around the project. Someone will likely take it over.
(explaining) it is a project to improve the current bittorrent protocol, that will simplify running trackers and file sharing

Q. What do you mean TPB will not be needed in the future?
I, we hope TPB get some competition, but something better then bittorrent.BT is half-centralized, and if you had something completely decentralized we will not need TPB. nor an institution that fights censorship and freedomthat would be better for us and internets. this is what we wish.
technically, BT was not designed for this scale of which it is being used today, personally i have not worked with TPB the last year of the simple reason I have not had the time. When I stopped 1-1.5 years ago we had already reached absurd levels of problems on the central trackers.

Q. How does if feel to channelize Swedens most expensive scene production ever (the spectrial)
I wrote a blog entry yesterday describing what has happened. In short:During a long time  its been expensive to produce tv series since actors are expensive, then reality-tv came along where you did not have to pay actors, now they are forcing us to be a part of it and are “paying us” by saying we may not end up in prison or pay million dollar fines… Beside we cannot deny being a part of it, state paying the bills. The only persons they have been forced to pay are cetrain police officers. But now they have got IPRED (law) through so during the next season of this show, they don’t even have to pay the police anymore.

Q. You say you do this for fun, but is it really?
TPB?, well, we spend a lot of your time with journalists. We wish we didn’t have to. But on a whole its fun.
when we started Piratbyrån it was only a part of what we did, no we have to spend full time on it.
It is incredibly exciting, and we learn a lot. We have no clue where this is heading. And it will continue like this..

Q. In context of this trial do you consider yourselves defendants or defenders of the current technology.
From a trial perspective we are at personal risk.We are not defending the technology itself, rather the idea of technology and it s is probably more important.Politically, that technology should remain free and not in control by an entity which don’t like
The prosecutor seems to focus a lot on TPB and us personally. I mean at least 1/4 of the investigation is an attempt of character assassination of the people involved.
I can.. ah. When I had my only hearing with the police their first question was if I wanted to explain my ideology and my politics, not if I was involved in TPB. It kind of sets the tone of all of this.

Q. How does this affect you personally?
The thing that has been cumbersome for me personally is the economical results of the somewhat mis-targeted raid may company was exposed to.
It resulted, last year in my working myself to death and that I had to sell the company, loosing about 300K (SEK). but right now I am most annoyed having to be in Sweden for 3 weeks.
And I am annoyed having to spend three weeks in Stockholm…

Q. What political consequences can you see from this trial, this process.
The ultimate dystopia is 50% 1984 and 50% neuromancer.
Was the an acceptable response?
We.. eh I don’t see anything negative regarding our trial as such, but there are a number of things surrounding this question that can have negative results, such as the copyright lobby will be asking for more action, and that the lobby is very good as influencing EU etc. They are representing an ugly type of politics (I think Sunde means they’re not being transparent). Politically we (TPB) have nothing to loose. WE will win no matter what the trial results in.  I don’t mean us personally, but as society.
The result of TPB trial is nothing compared to the integrity and freedom we are loosing through some of the laws we have passed (FRA, IPRED etc.) the last year.

Q. Approximately what is the maintenance cost for TPB?
I don’t have an actual figure, we use quite a lot of bandwidth and we have to buy new servers every other week..
Just the tracker service  use on average 600Mbit of bandwidth. Global bandwidth, at least. and it goes up during the weekends. Current hardware purchasing cost maybe 60-70 thousand dollars (year) and it has to be replaced maybe once a year.I think it’s even more?, I haven’t been working on this for long.Lets make it 120K and that would make the monthly hardware maint. about 10K dollars. It’s just approximate numbers, we don’t have exact number, but it would be somewhere in that vicinity.

Q. How does TPB feel about how the press has dealt with this?
Thats a very interesting question. Some members of the press we don’t like so we didn’t invite them today. And they are very mad at us, for instance TV4. They are actually going to make some beg thing out of it.And there are some press the really don’t care about the effects this has on society, which is really bad. And they re just interested in doing something spectacular instead of actually discussing the issues. So the media that is not invited today is basically the media that has been..not negative.. but been lying instead, and keeping things from the public. We don’t have a problem with negative press, there’s a lot of people in this room that don’t like us, and we don’t really care about that as long as they discuss the issues. I would say the most of the press has been very good towards us actually, discussing.. more and more discussing the issues surrounding the pirate bay then focusing on us as persons which is what we want.
2 short comments on this in Swedish, we have prevented some Swedish press from attending this press conference, or rather some member of the Swedish press. Ind it’s about them forgetting there are three live, individuals that are being prosecuted and that it is hard on them personally. The least we demand is respect and common sense. Some media have not demonstrated that, so they are not welcome.
Just to add, we do this in our spare time. We have no duty to be here, to be accessible 24/7, to deliver content to media without getting paid… We do this because it is fun which means we need to prioritize And why would we prioritize TV4 instead of bloggers, we want to have broad coverage, both old and new channels.
we primarily choose to de-prioritize TV4 due to the Arboga-case, as I am sure you remember. TV4, despite we had explained to the reporters exactly how this works (trackers, torrents) they choose to present the thing as TPB were publishing pictures of dead children on our website. And they did not pick up the debate that would be good for the society to take around this. This is something they did deliberately, being totally informed about what it would mean. In the end, when you grow tired of someone, spend your time with them, you want to be treated with respect. (etc.)
(provides a summary of the Arboga case, and how it was treated by TV4)

Q. Which media are not welcome here?

TV4, Metro, Aftonbladet. I hope that no one in the audience are from any of those media…

end

transcript by mengedej. Thanks very much!