Copyright Law

Pirate Bay Lawyer Demands Retrial

By soulxtc

Note presiding judge is a member of several pro-copyright associations, including one that includes Peter Danowsky, the record industry’s lead attorney in the case, and lobbies for increased copyright protection laws.

The recent guilty verdict against Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay just got a bit more interesting with news that the judge in the trial, Judge Tomas Norström, is an active member of several pro-copyright groups: the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, the Swedish Association of Copyright, and .SE, The Internet Infrastructure Foundation. The former actively lobbies for more stringent copyright laws.

The Swedish Association of Copyright, a discussion forum. While such an affiliation may seem harmless, other members of the organization include Henrik Pontén, Monique Wadsted, and Peter Danowsky — three key representatives in the entertainment industry’s case against Pirate Bay.

The Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an organization devoted to implementing stronger copyright laws. Norström sits on the board.

.SE, The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, another harmless-sounding affiliation with another questionable allegiance: Monique Wadsted is also a member of this group that oversees the .se name domain and handles domain disputes.

What’s particularly saddening is that these are some of the same groups that several of the entertainment industry plaintiffs, the lead attorney for the IFPI in particular, in The Pirate Bay case are members of, a fact not lost on lawyers for The Pirate Bay who demand that the case be retried with a new, actually impartial, judge.

“I will point that out in my appeal, then the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” said Peter Althin, lawyer for Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde.

He too was stunned by the revelation.

“This is completely new to me,” Althin told The Associated Press. “It is reasonable that we should have known about this before. It is a clear case of bias.”

He notes that he asked for another lay judge to be excluded in the case after similar associations were discovered.

Sweden?s former Ombudsmen of Justice, Rune Lavin, says that he himself would not have taken the case in this situation and it is clear that Judge Tomas Norström should not have done so either.

“It is very clear that he never should have taken the case,” says Eric Bylander, Associate Professor of Procedural Law at the School of Gothenburg.

The Pirate Party is also demanding a retrial with a different judge.

“The copyright lobby has really managed to bring corruption to Sweden,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge said in a statement.

Judge Norström today denies that his involvement with the pro-copyright organizations constituted a “conflict of interest” in his ability to preside over the most high-profile trial involving illegal file-sharing in European, if not world, history.

“My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest,” Norström told Sveriges Radio. “Each time I take a case, I consider whether I consider myself to be biased. I have not assessed that in this case.”

However, just because the judge thinks he’s unbiased, which I can’t even fathom how, its the appearance to the public and the defendants that matters most. It doesn’t matter what he thinks.

What if the judge had been a card carrying member of a pro-file-sharing organization that actively lobbied for removing copyright protections? I guarantee the entertainment industry wouldn’t have let a negative verdict go unchallenged either.

“Regardless of what position the judge has, this could be seen as bad,” added Bylander. “In a high-profile trial like this, it surprises me that he hasn’t been more cautious.”

It’s surprising to us all.

It makes the trial an even greater “spectrial” than it already was if you remember how the Chief Swedish police investigator in the investigation against The Pirate Bay, Jim Keyzer, later became an an employee of Warner Bros before the trial had even begun!

Maybe Sweden’s not the enlightened country many thought it to be. At least in the US you could get a decent trial, one where the judge and the plaintiffs aren’t having a “bromance.”

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).