Intellectual Property Law

Pirate Bay Bias Charge: ?Random? Judge Assignment Wasn?t

By David Kravets and Kerstin Sjoden

Pirate Bay Judge Tomas Norström is under fire again. AP Photo

New allegations questioning the legitimacy of The Pirate Bay trial surfaced Friday when lawyers for the four file-sharing defendants accused the Swedish courts of secretely streering the case to a hostile judge. 

The latest ethics charges in the aftermath of the April conviction of the four founders of the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker alleged that the judge who presided over the trial wasn’t chosen at random, as is required under Swedish law. The allegations came weeks after it was revealed that the same judge, Tomas Norström, is a member of pro-copyright enforcement groups.

“We?ve found some things, particularly about the random selection. It doesn?t seem to have been random,” Per Samuelson, one of the defendant’s lawyers, told Swedish television station SVT. Samuelson, who is demanding a retrial, declined to elaborate on the latest misconduct allegations.

Norström declined comment.

Cecilia Klerbo, the chief magistrate of the district court in Stockholm, where the case was tried, said the presiding judge was chosen at random.  “The procedure was carried out as usual,” she told SVT.

After weeks of testimony and delays ending April 17, Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.

In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.

In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun moving toward legitimacy.

But the verdict also triggered a political backlash among Swedish youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size, giving the copyright-reform party a genuine shot a landing a seat in the European Parliment.

The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users, keeps operating as usual, despite the contested convictions.

The first ethics violations lobbed against the court centered on Judge Norstrom’s membership in organizations that lobby for stricter copyright legislation.

Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and is a board member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

Some legal experts said the appearance of bias by the judge is enough for a retrial.

“The confidence in the legal system demands that the appeals court regards this is as a conflict of interest, and that means that the appeals court must order a retrial in the district court,” said Eric Bylander, a Gothenburg University legal scholar, told The Local, an English-language news site in Sweden.

See Also:

• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
• The Pirate Bay’s Anonymity Service Signs 100000 Users Pre-Launch …
• Pirate Bay Trial: The Hottest Ticket in Stockholm
• Pirate Bay Opponents Hit by Denial-of-Service

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 15, 2009 (boomark / email).