Peter "Brokep" Sunde was convicted in Sweden's notorious Pirate Bay trial, and now faces prison time and a multimillion-euro fine. As his imprisonment looms, he describes, in detail, the bizarre circumstances of his conviction, which started with an illegal raid ordered by the US trade representative, continued with an investigation led by a prosecutor who'd already accepted a job with Warner Brothers as a copyright enforcer and was just working through his notice period as he pursued Peter; and then a trial that included a judge and multiple jurors who were literally getting paychecks from the large copyright industry associations. Peter was convicted on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence of having configured a load-balancer in a data-centre used by The Pirate Bay (this load-balancer was not plugged in at the time of the raid, and there's no evidence it was ever plugged in).
On the basis of this corrupt, ugly, kangaroo court, the Swedish justice system is ready to put him in jail for an "economic debt to some of the world’s richest corporations," offshore bullies who have perverted the course of justice in Sweden.
Sunde is the co-founder of Flattr, a company whose sole mission is seeing to it that the money fans spend on art goes directly to artists, without any funny record label or movie studio accounting in the middle. He also co-founded IPREDator, an amazing VPN that I use every day to stop my logins and passwords from being harvested by crooks and bad guys. He's one of the good guys, and he's being martyred by Big Content, with the complicity of a corrupt Swedish establishment. It is a shame of global proportion. Poor Peter.
A few months prior, a Swedish prosecutor had arrived at the conclusion that this service could not be sentenced for any crime in Sweden. He sent a memo explaining this to his superiors. After a meeting between representatives from the Justice Department and Sven-Erik Alhem, the over-prosecutor at the time, the prosecutor in question reconsiders. A quick raid was required, with full force. So full a force, in fact, that when the raid is actually conducted, the police have no idea what to grab. They seize hundreds of computers, in several cities, but also loudspeakers, cables, and the like. They don’t know the size of the things they’re supposed to be looking for, and decide – during the raid in session – to rent trucks from local gas stations to ship off all the seized goods. In short, it is stressful, unplanned, and ill considered. So ill considered that the police even missed several locations where the target of the raid had ongoing activities.
Thomas Bodström promised to come clear with what had happened. And yet, over 700 mails between him and the United States regarding this matter were (and remain) classified as secrets of the State. We still haven’t seen them. In the aftermath of the political scandal that was uncovered, Swedish national records were set in charges filed with the Constitutional Committee (Konstitutionsutskottet), Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO) and Chancellor of Justice (Justitiekanslern). The newly-founded Swedish Pirate Party became one of Sweden’s largest in a matter of days. A few weeks later, an election was held. None of the young wanted to vote for the ruling Social Democrats any longer, knowing that the Social Democrats had sold out their interests to rich lobby organizations in the United States. The Social Democrats lost power, partly because of this scandal…
..,Tomas Norström is very interested in copyright cases. So interested, in fact, that he also happened to be a member in the Swedish Association for Copyright, and was a board member of the Swedish Association For Industrial Legal Protection, SFIR[3]. Two organizations that take a very clear stance on copyright issues. The associations are daughter associations of ALAI and AIPPI, two international organizations whose statutes state their goal to strengthen the interests of copyright holders. The chairpeople for these international organizations frequently make statements condemning all kinds of copyright violations, and work for harsher punishment for violations.
Tomas Norström didn’t consider himself to be biased. Besides, he neglected to disclose his engagements since he regarded them as without consequence to the case. There was plenty of opportunity for him to consider his bias before the trial, as I personally had checked the layman judges[4] and found that two of them were biased. When my lawyer officially communicated this, Norström published a press release where he said he had found one biased layman judge (without mentioning the complaint from us). He had found a composer who had been active in the record labels that were suing us. There was another layman judge who got the paycheck from these industries, who Norström did not consider biased.
Aftermath of The Pirate Bay Trial: Peter Sunde’s Plea – In His Own Words – Falkvinge on Infopolicy
