In yet another amusing development in The Pirate Bay saga, a lawyer representing the three men behind the rogue BitTorrent tracker has denied they in fact own the file-sharing service. The legal man was speaking in a Dutch court in response to that previously reported court ruling that fined the men behind the tracker 30,000 euros a day for every day they continued to offer their BitTorrent search engine to web-users in the Netherlands.
Lawyer Ernst-Jan Louwers said on Thursday that Peter Sunde, until recently the voice of The Pirate Bay, had never had a stake in the service. His co-founders, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Warg, had once owned it - the lawyer said - but sold it in 2006. Any liability for the thirty grand a day fines, he therefore implied, lay with the Bay's current owners. Under questioning, however, Louwers was not able to prove any sale took place in 2006, and wouldn't say who the service was sold to.
As far as I can remember, neither Sunde, Neij nor Warg claimed to have sold the Bay in 2006 during their high profile combined criminal/civil copyright infringement trial in the Swedish courts earlier this year. Given prison sentences were on the cards then as well as unpayable fines, you'd have thought they'd have tried that defence had it been an option. Though the three men did, in that trial, try to portray the Pirate Bay enterprise as a chaotic coalition of online friends rather than a formal business.
Stichting Brein, the Dutch copyright organisation pursuing the case against the Bay, was not convinced by Louwers' arguments for circumventing liability. They did admit, however, that they had served papers against a Seychelles-registered company called Reservella which they say owns the Piratebay.org domain. However that company, they argue, is run by Neij, so doesn't count as the alternative owners claimed by the Bay Three's lawyer.
As an interesting aside, while the Piratebay.org domain is indeed registered to a company called Reservalle, the admin contact for which is Neij, his colleague Sunde says this is not a Seychelles-registered company at all, and simply a name used by his fellow Bayer when registering domain names. I think he's basically saying that while the Bay is not owned by him and other guys, nor is it owned by a Seychelles-based company run by Neij.
Moreover, he is accusing Stichting Brein of making up the Seychelles company to try and make it appear that Neij, at least, cannot avoid liability on ownership grounds. If said allegations were proven to be true that would seriously hinder the copyright body's standing in court, even if judges remain sympathetic to their infringement claim. You can read Sunde's allegations on his blog here...