TPB 4 face prosecutor's wrath

The prosecutor in The Pirate Bay case stands by the original verdict meted out to the defendants last year and claimed today that the four co-founders of the BitTorrent tracker site had “engaged in contempt of court”.

TPB’s appeal trial ends late this week and ahead of that the prosecution spent much of this morning summing up the case (in Swedish) at the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm, Sweden.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall said that he saw no grounds for changing the one-year prison sentence verdict that followed April 2009’s high-profile trial against Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg.

Roswall alleged that the men continued to run the TPB site, despite the defendants denying any recent connection with it.

"Three days after the police's major crackdown on The Pirate Bay, they resumed operations," he said.

The prosecutor claimed new evidence involving a separate hearing with Neij, who was not present at the start of the appeal, had strengthened the case against the TPB men.

"Lundström had a strong commitment. He participated in the planning and development of the site and acted as an adviser," Roswall added.

The Pirate Bay mouthpiece Sunde, AKA BrokeP, told us in April this year that Lundström had "wanted to invest in [TPB] but there was never a company set up, never an organisation. He never paid anything in the set up of The Pirate Bay. There was no need for him to pay."

When quizzed by The Register about how much money the men had made out of the operation, Sunde said: "I can’t prove that I don’t have a bank account somewhere with lots of money. And it’s kinda the same for Carl [Lundström], he can’t prove he’s not part of this if the media says he’s part of this. We don't have proof for something we haven’t done."

The trial continues and is expected to conclude on Friday, 15 October. ®