Day 8 was certainly a day for more prosecution witnesses. The court heard from major entertainment CEO’s and anti-piracy CEO’s, none of which knew how torrent technology worked.
Normally I’d say that’s fair enough, these guys deal with very different things day to day – and they’re pretty far from computer geeks. I say normally, because in this case despite their admitted lack of understanding – they absolutely blame the technology anyway. I’d say the prosecution are leaving their technically minded witnesses for last.
The day was spent with witnesses claiming TPB accounted for billions of dollars in lost revenue. A few even pointed to studies done on the topic of illegal file sharing and worldwide sales. Apparently ‘all but one’ have drawn a direct link between the two. Unfortunately the prosecution were unable to answer the defendants lawyer when asked if anti-piracy firms or the entertainment industry had funded these studies.
It was also pointed out that in 2008 Sweden had its best year for movie sales in history. The prosecution had no comment to make on the factors for the recent success.
I found it quite interesting reading that, given that in a lot of the anti-TPB literature I have come across in the last few weeks they generally site a ‘lack of respect’ of the Swedish youth for copyright law. Apparently most of the youth believe free downloading of copyrighted material should be legal. While this may be true, it certainly seems at odds with the idea that somehow their being able to download has damaged sales, and that alone is the reason the music and movie industry is having trouble. This is especially interesting given that the ‘great year for music sales’ occurred in Sweden, the home of super fast internet and of course, The Pirate Bay.
The back end of the trial consisted of some explanation as to how the entertainment industry calculated their lost revenue due to downloaded material. It works like this:
X is the number of total movie downloads in a year
Y is the market share of a movie, as a percentage.
Y percent of X = Z
Z is the number of times the film has been downloaded that year
This clearly assumes that every single movie downloaded results in 1 less movie ticket sold.
With that, the day ended.
Further information below, and as listed in previous days reports:
