I've been listening in on The Pirate Bay trial almost every day for the past two weeks.  Through it I have gotten a renewed and impassioned sympathy for the pirate movement.  Actually, we can call it Free Culture if you prefer.  The prosecuting side has attacked the tongue-in-cheek P-word time and time again: "Their intentions are clear, just listen to the name!".

Well, as with the free software / open source movement, pirates in this sense is not about free in the monetary sense.  It's about freedom and access.  It's about being able to share.  And not least it's about being able to take advantage of this incredible technology we have for creating.  That's ultimately my fear and what fuels my passion for this issue, that we will be locked in, scared of breaking the rules and as such not being able to grab the fantastic opportunities for cultural development that is already out there and will only become bigger as we figure out how to use the internet in more adventurous ways and as technology develops to make all this possible.

Throughout the trial I have this gorgeously melancholic passage from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas spinning in my head:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

It might seem pompous to quote Thompson writing about the monumental counter culture movement in the 60s and 70s, but I'm constantly hoping that that's not how it'll turn out, that this wave of freedoms that we seem within grasping reach of (if we don't already have them, I guess that's what the courts will decide) will slip out of our hands and the future will be one where private companies at will can make a living by threatening citizens instead of one where we're all free to share, create, copy, improve, imitate and consume.

I got a story from a good friend of mine about the "old world" last night.  It was a world in which a borrowed paper copy from a photocopier in the library had to be handed back for destruction.  Could my friend have copied the copies in between?  Absolutely.  A nonsensical act that all too sadly reminds a lot about the current furious fight in court presenting  supposed evidence of a 1 to 1 relationships between a download and a lost sale.

Of course there needs to exist systems so that people who wish to charge for their creation can offer people a way to do so, but the fact is that the old order is breaking down. Artists who were formerly on the prosecution's side have jumped ship.  We're not dealing with paper copies and trucks to move them anymore.  We're dealing with electrons in copper and light in fiber.  I think we're moving past the middle man role of the record companies and distribution companies in a sense, or at least changing their role drastically.  We're moving past the point where it's possible (never mind desirable!) to reign in these bits and bytes.  In some areas we're moving past the possibilities for market segmentation, for complete control over your product.  Follow the doctrine and ye shall succeed.

So to answer my headline: overture, no doubt.  Preferably something with cannons.

Maintain hardline kopimi.

Hear the great Leonard Cohen live from the Beacon Theatre over at NPR's All Songs Considered Live In Concert series.  It's the first U.S. show for the 74 year old poet and singer/songwriter in 15 years.

Thanks to my wife for the tip!

Professor Roger Wallis testified in The Pirate Bay trial yesterday on behalf of the three defendants.  The cross-examination was the most heated one so far in the trial, with the prosecuting side trying to diminish the professor's credentials.  At one point the exchange got so worked up that the court called a 10 minute pause, before which the flustered professor exclaimed "What kind of people are you?  God save Sweden!".

Turns out there's a story behind his short fuse with the prosecuting side yesterday - Wallis let it slip out that the record company and movie studio lawyers have been calling his university with insinuating questions trying to fish for discrediting information.  His wife had hardly been sleeping for the past couple days he said.

Right, his wife, that's the key to this story.  At the end of the testimony, each witness is asked if they demand a compensation from the court.  Roger Wallis did not, except maybe if the court could be so good as to send some flowers to his wife.  The main judge replied that he was afraid that was out of the budget of the court.

Enter the internet.

An IRC channel and a campaign site was set up  immediately to send some flowers and other appreciations to Wallis' wife!  No doubt spurred by the rather vicious questioning from the lawyer Danowsky, hundreds of people that had heard the testimony on the radio sprung into action.

As I write this, the registered gifts are up to SEK 42.121 and the Wallis couple have been interviewed for several newspapers about it.  (links on the campaign site).   Moving!

Wallis' testimony contradicted much of what we had heard in court the day before about loss of revenue because of file sharing.  The professor was of the opinion - backed by research papers - that on the contrary, file sharing actually just moves the income from one place to another.  Maybe there's a loss in CD sales, but it's compensated in other areas by heightened interest in music.  He also got to highlight the fact that swedish cinema reported having their best year ever last year.  It's rather baffling then, to hear Universal exec Per Sundin complain the day before about a loss of revenue which he absolutely 100% blames file sharing for.

John Kennedy was asked in the Pirate Bay Trial if the record industry had taken actions against Google for their indexing torrents.  They had not, because as he said, Google had chosen to partner with them rather than work against them.  As I write this there are 2,040 torrent files on the keyword "coldplay" indexed on Google and 969 for the same on The Pirate Bay.

Apologies to Anna Troberg for stealing her headline but I think it's worth highlighting the difference between the two in terms of actual torrent files (whether legal content or otherwise).

Ooooh! Some benchmarks are already in and it's looking very promising.  Over 5 times faster than IE8 on Javascript execution.  IE7 isn't on the graph but is mentioned in the results, simply because putting it on the graph would make the other results invisible.  Nice.  This is the browser we'll be stuck with for the next loooong while as the remaining 30% of the internet finally gets around to upgrading from IE6.  See you in 2012, IE8!

But this isn't IE's day, it's Safari we're talking about!  Cool new GUI stuff, more native windows look (although I'm not sure that tab bar stuck on top of the window frame can be called native) and native text rendering (noooooo!  give me my Mac font smoothing back!)  Looking forward to playing with it.

What keeps surprising me is that Apple and Microsoft doesn't realise web developers and regular users might need to keep their old browser versions around - at least while the new one is in Beta, and usually for as long as the older one is in use (cough-IE6-cough).  Safari 4 replaces Safari 3, and IE8 replaces all other IEs.  In the case of Internet Explorer there's Multiple IE but I have yet to see a solution for Safari.  A bit strange considering you can download their nightly build (almost) every day and run it alongside your installed version.

We've had a chance to hear from Fredrik Neij in the trial this morning.  Since I haven't listened in to any trials before and my legal experience so far consists of scattered episodes of L.A. Law in the early nineties (lately I've been sharpening my legal senses with Law & Order), all I can add to the commentary so far today is that the prosecution comes across as fumbling around in the dark when they're trying to establish intent from Fredrik.  Neij had to explain technical aspects to them that they really should have known from their investigations.  I would think the prosecuting side have a pretty good technical team behind them, so maybe something got lost in translation?

See, the way it works in the movies - and let's face it, movies never lie - is that prior to the trial people tend to run heated simulations of these cross interrogations to prepare.  So far we've heard misunderstandings about the DNS system, disbelief that it is possible to run a site like The Pirate Bay as a hobby project and surprise that a site like The Pirate Bay can grow based on user demand and not as a specific plan to "expand the business".

We got a few snide remarks from Neij too.  This one was particularily funny, given his reputed penchant for drinking and late mornings:

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall: You didn't advertise for the site on MSN or such? Fredrik Neij: If I can't be bothered to answer emails I'm not likely to go out and advertise for [TPB].

Roswall also dug himself deep into technical territory asking what format the site was transferred from the starting servers in Mexico to new servers in Sweden.  The rather dry reply from Neij:  ".tar.gzip".  It sounded as if Roswall was hoping for Neij to stumble and reveal his supposed crime with that question.

Yesterday's post of the day award (a one-time affair, despite its name), goes to Christan Engström, one of the founders of the Swedish Pirate Party.  Engström is not a lawyer, but was a nämndeman (a kind of expanded-rights juror) in the Swedish court system for a while.  Here is a Google Translation of the post for the fennoscandically challenged.

He offers a titillating bit of gossip (my translation):

They should be able to just end the trial now, said a person I was in the lift with.  I don't want to say who it was.

The examination of the three defendants, Fredrik, Gottfrid og Peter, is moved up to 09:00 this morning.  Follow along at  svt.se.

As Tweeted by guff_se:

Just a thought... What if the copyright industry are purposely losing the TPB-case so that they can call for new, stricter laws?

I was going to post about The Pirate Bay trial today, but I must admit I've had a full time job just parsing the news myself, and so many bloggers are writing incredibly well about the trial already.

I did want to highlight Emma's post (in Swedish, so try the Google translation) at opassande.se about the seeming failure of half the prosecution's case today.  This partial translation is mine:

For me the big question today is whether the prosecutor lacks knowledge and preparation or if I am the one lacking legal knowledge.  Well, of course I'm not adequately knowledgeable, but I think you get my point.  Who is missing the target here, and if it is the prosecutor, how the hell did that happen?

That about sums up my feeling about today too, the prosecutor has been ridiculed to bits online, perhaps too much so but in part deservingly for his fumbling around with the computer setup (remember, this guy is the IT prosecutor in Sweden).  But I am still left with this nagging sense of: that really can't be all they have, can it??

The coming days will be interesting.  I don't have the calendar in front of me at the moment, but I think Monique Walsted is coming on tomorrow morning, followed by the three Pirate Bay defendants.  Listen in live on svt.se's live stream.

The Pirate Bay trial starts this morning in Stockholm.  Follow the audio at svt.se 24 Direkt.  Live updates tagged with #spectrial on Twitter.

Also, I'm following the trial on a few RSS feeds.  Here is that feed list exported as an OPML file, for import into your favourite newsreader.  A few of these are Swedish language only.

The press conference yesterday, held jointly by Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay, was interesting.  I especially took note of Peter Sunde estimating the amount of traffic related to The Pirate Bay on the net.  Sunde said that about 80% of internet traffic today is torrents, and about half of that is related to The Pirate Bay.  Even if the 80% figure is exaggerated, and I don't know if it is or not, that's still an incredible amount of traffic.