Until yesterday the trial against The Pirate Bay had been pretty straight forward, if somewhat mundane, but things took a new turn of events during yesterday's hearing of two expert witnesses that were called to talk about various technical aspects of how The Pirate Bay operates.

First up was Kristoffer Schollin who is a lecturer at the Gothenburg University and he specialises in bit-torrent technology and digital rights management. Schollin has been following The Pirate Bay since late 2004 and summarised that the torrent technology is used for a wide range of things such as distributing the World of Warcraft game updates and even Intel uses the technology. As such, the technology itself is not illegal, or at least it isn't until the court has made its judgement in this case.

He also defended The Pirate Bay, saying it wasn't the biggest torrent site out there, albeit maybe the most prolific one, more so now after all the media attention than ever before. He also calls The Pirate Bay a political movement and that they make far less money from things like advertising than their Russian counterparts. He goes on to say that these days it's easier to find torrent files via Google than using The Pirate Bay, mostly because Google has a much better search engine and has access to more searchable data.

There was also some questions with regards to what happens to a torrent if no-one downloads it and how the files linked to a torrent files are distributed and the fact that as long as there are no seeders, no-one can download the files linked with the torrent. The biggest concern from the prosecution was with regards to how the counters on The Pirate Bay works in terms of how many people are downloading a file. However, Schollin said he didn't know how it counters were updated and the prosecution might have won a small battle here by making the court believe that it updates every time someone has downloaded all the data linked to the torrent files.

A question with regards to suggestions that if The Pirate Bay was closed, 40 percent of the traffic on the Internet would cease was disregarded by Schollin, saying that he was told the same figures by his mother. Another important aspect is with regards to The Pirate Bay being a search service provider, like Google, or not, as if this is the case, then The Pirate Bay would not be directly responsible for its content.

During a break the members of court are overheard talking about what has been discussed during the earlier part of the day and most of them don't seem to understand the technical aspects of how it all works.

Next up, KTH professor Roger Wallis was called to the stand and this is when the circus came to town. Prior to the trial during a radio show, Universal Music's Swedish Vice President Per Sundin had gone out and said that Wallis was a guest professor at the university and Henrik Pontén from the Swedish antipiracy agency had called up various university institution alongside Wallis' boss and asked about his research and the quality of it, as other research didn't turn up the same results.

Wallis has done research into the fact that piracy might not actually affect the overall sales for many of the companies affected, much in the same way that the cassette tape didn't kill off record tapes many years ago. He stated that although CD sales are down, concert ticket sales are up by a much higher amount, but the record industry doesn't like this, as they get a smaller slice of the money cake from concerts compared to CD sales.

This is when the prosecutor started to get really nasty and questioned Wallis' placement at the university, as he only works there 30 percent of his time. He also questioned where the funding for the research had come from and what part of the university had asked for it to be done. The prosecutor continued to question Wallis' qualifications and got very personal and a heated argument started between the two. In the end the judge had to call for a short recess to try to calm things down.

After the short break, the prosecutor starts questioning Wallis' political and ideological views and more arguments between the two take place and the judge calls for lunch break. The afternoon carries on in a similar manner with the representative for the movie companies also having some unusual questions for Wallis. She asks him who loses out the most due to file sharing and Wallis replies that it's the disc manufacturers, just like the self playing piano manufacturers lost out when the gramophone was invented.

The rest of the day is dedicated to other charges against Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg.

In related news, it turns out that one of the plaintiffs are actually for piracy, as the Danish director Henrik Danstrup has said that he doesn't understand why he's listed as one of the plaintiffs in the case. His signature is on a document that was handed in by the Swedish antipiracy agency and it's possible that they might have forged his signature in this case, although this is a separate matter that will hopefully be looked into.