Pirate Bay Closer to a Retrial, Demands New Investigation
The connections of Pirate Bay judge Tomas Norström to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups are even more far reaching than initially reported. Consequently, many leading figures within the Swedish judicial system are now convinced that a retrial is necessary so the defendants can have an unbiased trial.
A few days after the verdict in the Pirate Bay trial was made public, judge Tomas Norström was heavily criticized for his involvement with pro-copyright lobby groups. To everyone’s surprise, Norström never declared these activities before he took on the case.
Together with several of the lawyers who represented the movie and music industries, the judge was a member of the Swedish Association of copyright (SFU) and the Swedish Association for Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR).
These engagements automatically make him a member of two major international pro-copyright organizations, ALAI and AIPPI. In their statutes, these organizations state that it’s their goal to ensure that the interests of copyright holders are satisfied. Indeed, by sentencing the Pirate Bay defendants to a year in prison in addition to the high damages they were ordered to pay, the judge lived up to these expectations.
Initially, many Swedish legal system insiders doubted whether the connections to the Swedish groups were enough to warrant a retrial, but the ties to ALAI and AIPPI have changed that perception, according to Swedish radio. Many of the insiders and experts wish to remain anonymous, but Eric Bylander, Associate Professor of Procedural Law at the University of Gothenburg said that “confidence in the judicial system requires that the court of appeal see this as bias.”
If a retrial is granted this would mean another win for the Pirate Bay defendants and a replay of the ‘Spectrial’, with possibly a rewritten ending. Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, one of the defendants convicted by the biased judge, hopes to see a retrial. “In the best interest of the Swedish people’s trust in the system a retrial should be not only granted, but pushed for,” he told TorrentFreak. Requests for a retrial have been filed and we will hear more about the outcome in a few weeks.
Aside from the biased judge, Peter and the other defendants will also request a new police investigation. The investigation on which the prosecution built its case was headed by Jim Keyzer, who already knew that he was going to be employed by Warner Bros. when he interviewed the defendants. “We want everything to be in the eye of the public so that we can get help to see that everything is correct,” Peter writes on his blog.
:source: Source: Ernesto | Blogpirate
