Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009    Text size: 

Acting as a witness for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry was attorney Magnus Mårtensson, who offered evidence that he had successfully downloaded music files using dot-torrent files gathered from The Pirate Bay.

But he ran into trouble when he had to reveal that his only evidence was a collection of screenshots he took of his actions. Defendant Gottfrid Svartholm Warg pointed out that Mårtensson had used no tracking software to record his activity.

The prosecution also once again downgraded its charges against the four defendants, Carl Lundström, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Warg, dropping an earlier claim that a user must have "all of the Pirate Bay's components" in order to download files.

As of Day 2 of the trial, the prosecuting attorney had dropped half of the charges against the four defendants. The charges originally held the four responsible for "complicity in the production of copyrighted material."

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall has altered those charges to simply read "complicity to make [copyrighted material] available."

The four men behind the popular torrent file search engine The Pirate Bay are on trial in Sweden, accused of helping millions of users download all kinds of illegal content.

The defendants are looking at up to two years in prison and about $140,000 in fines (1.2 million kronor) if convicted.