Usually when you put "geeks" on the stand, they immediately spill their guts, making the conviction trivial. (Example: Hans Reiser.) In this case, the defendants always have a clever reply for the prosecutor's "clever" question, which is making the prosecution's case extremely difficult. (Also making the case difficult is the silliness of the law, and the innocence of the defendants.)
My guess is that TPB has a really good legal team that prepared the TPB folks for all of the prosecution's questions. That is also good to see. Usually the people with worthy causes don't have enough money to defend themselves from the Big Bad Corporations, but in this case they do.
Finally, the prosecutor(s?) don't seem very competent about anything. The quote yesterday about DHT and being able to distribute torrents via e-mail seemed to really confuse them. (You mean TPB isn't actually making copyrighted files available? Damn, there goes our whole case!)
Maybe things are different in Sweden, but under common law that's pretty difficult, especially in copyright where some situations have never been tested in court. A lot of lawyers were going around saying that Grokster was obviously legal while others were saying it was obviously illegal. IANAL.
I think I've clued in to something, the prosecution is doing it's very best to try to establish more than just an advertiser link between Oded Daniel and TPB crew, they are trying to make it out as though Oded Daniel is the owner of TPB and the guys they caught are employees.
The reason for that is probably because they can't imagine that a bunch of gifted young people would be capable of such a feat, they have to invoke the 'guy behind the screen' in order to make it more believable for themselves.
Yes and no. I think they're trying to find a single point of responsibility. TPB crew keeps dancing around who was responsible for which aspects of TPB, which makes prosecution extremely difficult.
It does, but it is also a dangerous game, the judge could simply order them to give testimony as to who is responsible for any one of those aspects. Somebody has to actually do it, if nobody 'did it' then somebody is lying... and lying to a judge is not very smart.
I've been surprised by exactly that. What I'm reading into the trial so far -- and I'm only reading the English summaries, so I'm probably missing out on a lot -- is that TPB aren't really completely owning up to, "He wrote the code, he did the graphics, he did this, we did that..." It almost even sounds like every time the prosecution tries to nail down responsibility for anything, the defendant says, "I only did that a little".
IF that's what's going on, then IF I were the judge or a jury member, I would interpret that as people avoiding responsibility for their actions, which to me would imply that they thought they were guilty of a crime.
Interesting. So, if they were so sure that they were not guilty then they'd have no problem in owning up to who did what. After all, if you are sure it is legal then that would be the cleanest strategy. By being wishy-washy they suggest that they are not so sure it is legal.
Usually when you put "geeks" on the stand, they immediately spill their guts, making the conviction trivial. (Example: Hans Reiser.) In this case, the defendants always have a clever reply for the prosecutor's "clever" question, which is making the prosecution's case extremely difficult. (Also making the case difficult is the silliness of the law, and the innocence of the defendants.)
My guess is that TPB has a really good legal team that prepared the TPB folks for all of the prosecution's questions. That is also good to see. Usually the people with worthy causes don't have enough money to defend themselves from the Big Bad Corporations, but in this case they do.
Finally, the prosecutor(s?) don't seem very competent about anything. The quote yesterday about DHT and being able to distribute torrents via e-mail seemed to really confuse them. (You mean TPB isn't actually making copyrighted files available? Damn, there goes our whole case!)