Pirate Bay judge accused of conflict of interest
This post was updated at 3:23 p.m. PDT to clarify the roles of the different Swedish professional groups.
The judge who ruled against The Pirate Bay defendants on Friday is a member of two copyright organizations, an alleged conflict of interest that could require the case to be tried again, Swedish press reported Thursday morning.
If the judge is formally found to have a conflict of interest, the case would have to be sent back to the district court. The issue is to be evaluated by the high court of justice, Svea Hovrätt (in Swedish), which is now also looking at appeals from the defendants on other grounds.
"In my appeal, I will urge that the verdict of the district court will be obviated due to conflict of interest," attorney Peter Althin, who is defending Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, told the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Sunde, along with Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström, were convicted Friday of having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing, and sentenced to one year in prison.
Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection. Both organizations say their goal is to educate about copyright issues. Among the members of the first organization are also Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky, and Monique Wadsted, all three of whom are lawyers who represented the plaintiffs during The Pirate Bay trial.
Norström denies accusations that the memberships would make him biased.
"Every time I take a case, I evaluate if I consider myself having a conflict of interest. In this case I didn't find to have one," Norström told Sveriges Radio, the national Swedish radio network that first exposed the issue on Thursday morning.
Norström also denies that he met privately with Wadsted, who represents several American media giants in the case. Both are also members of a separate professional group of a dozen law experts helping to resolve disputes on domain names under Sweden's top domain, .se.
Norström was asked to compare his situation to one with a potential jury member who declined to participate in the case because of a membership in a composers' association. In response, Norström told Dagens Nyheter that the Swedish Copyright Association only promotes knowledge about copyright, and that he is a member so he can follow related debate and development.
Wadsted also said that all jurists in Stockholm who deal with intellectual property are members of the The Swedish Copyright Association.
Still, Eric Bylander, a procedural law instructor at the University of Gothenburg finds the judge's situation questionable. "A membership here and a working community there would each maybe not be enough to constitute conflict of interest, but together they can," he told the Swedish national news agency, TT.
Pictured, from left, are Pirate Bay defendants Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Carl Lundström is not pictured.
(Credit: Pontus Alexander/Fabian Landgren)
Or are you an expert in Swedish law? What are your credentials?
And for the record, if you go after The Pirate Bay, you need to go after every other search engine out there. I use Google to download copyrighted material all the time. :-)
You don't need a law degree to be able to tell what the site was designed for.
Yeah, and? They always claimed that what they do is legal under Swedish law.
So, you may not need a law degree to tell what their site was designed for, but you probably need a Swedish law degree to know if it is legal or not.
And the legality under Swedish law is the only thing that matters for a website in Sweden, not if you "can tell what the site was designed for."
Or are you willing to part with freedom of speech just because some other countries don't have that concept?
TPB hosts and serves up links, not copyrighted material. I can use Google to exclusively search for copyrighted material and the fact that's what most people use TPB for doesn't make them any more guilty than Google.
Try googling: Mission Impossible filetype:torrent
Sure the TPB guys are cocky, wouldn't you be if sharks were constantly on your back when you know you're not doing anything against the law?
Refused to remove illegal listings mocked lawyers and posted confidential emails publicly they had it coming.
"Tracker Files" tells me you have no clue what or how the place even works, or how bittorrent technology works. Google lets you download your so called "Tracker Files", as well as just about any other search engine. These all 'direct your client to the illegal content'.
Also, they did help out the groups complaining. They were kindly told to go sue the users, you know... the actual people who may be violating Intellectual Property.
Have a great day!
You know that download this torrent button you click on? That downloads a file that when executed by a bittorrent client directs it to the content.
They weren't accused of hosting content they were accused of promoting illegal activity.
And I used the term tracker file for .torrent same difference both mean the same in a sense.
Thanks for the educational speech. I am glad you ignored the rest of my comments.
Have a nice day!
Your argument contains a basic fallacy: YOU BELIEVE what they are doing is criminal, therefore you say they have criminal intent, therefore you believe what they are doing is criminal.
If someone hands a bank teller a note that says "I want money now", YOU may consider it a case closed, criminal intent, attempted robbery . . . but it may be someone responding to a bank ad for an instant approval loan.
Openly mocking and refusing to remove listings to illegal content once again does that sound like a company who wants to respect copyright holders?
The Pirate Bay is not a company. There is no structure as stated in the court case. Refusing to follow a law that does not apply to them (DMCA) is not illegal.
Pirates who had ships often went to bays... where they docked. This could have been the intent of the name. Did you create the site? Nope, so my guess is you don't know the real intentions behind the name.
TPB wasn't doing anything illegal
many of the laws here in the US like the [stupid] DMCA do not apply in sweden
What a site is called and what you "think" about what it means doesn't matter the slightest bit.
What matters is if what the owners of the site actually DO is or is not illegal under the laws of the country where the owners and/or the site are located.
And mocking other companies, while it can be considered immature, is not necessarily illegal, either.
Things "sounding" bad is not what any decent law book anywhere in the world is based on. And "sounding" bad is highly society-dependent. Things that may "sound bad" in one society may be accepted in another society.
Disgusted of Stockholm
See how easy it is to pretend on the intertubes?
Your name? Website? Are you willing to post the same thing on your own website? *Then* you have credibility.
Disgusted of Stockholm
I havn't heard of any cases that went to trial where no law was broken.
no SWEDISH law was broken
TPB is perfectly legal
moral/ethical is a different question, but it is legal
Are you implying that the outcome of all trials are already clear even before the trials have started?
Why have any trial at all, then??? Surely you'd love living under a dictatorial regime...
I havn't heard of any cases that went to trial where no law was broken.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That has got to be the single most dangerous and stupid comment I've read all year. Will someone please send this r-**** somewhere that thinks like it does - maybe Iran, China or North Korea.
Who would have thunk? This is clearly a conflict of interest.
So pretty much, it seems based on the facts in that video that the corruption kind of leaked out of USA.
?The judge is not only a member of the Swedish Copyright Association but also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an organization that lobbies for tougher copyright laws.?
http://www.newsy.com/videos/pirate_bay_pirates_at_bay/
Talk about your worst case scenarios for the Pirate Bay owners. A retrial needs to happen.
Lets defend criminals god forbid any of you write a program and try to sell it.
Swedish law?... still up for grabs depending the outcome of the final ruling years from now.
You keep spouting "illegal" this and "illegal" that.
LMFAO. Have a nice day!
You seem to think so.
tpb is not illegal!
it is legal under swedish law because the DMCA doesn't exist there
and aren't Crytek devs *happy* about the number of people that pirated Crysis? Aren't they happy that so many people are enjoying their game even if it doesn't give them extra cash? The people who are complaining are mainly the big corrupted companies, not the bands/devs/... themselves.
Kill off the MafIIAAs ... the guys who try to hold mankind at ransom.
In regards of TPBs action was legal or illegal, you have to understand that just because things are illegal in your country it is not necessary illegal in other countries.
It is illegal to run a online gambling site in the USA. It is not in Malta. So thats why they are there. Until recently, TPBs actions were not illegal under Swedish Law. When new laws were introduced, this case was taken on to see where the new law (which was very poorly written) would land on file sharing.
As an amateur film maker, I can understand that people gets pissed off when people steal your stuff and you loose potential income. Who does´nt. The problem with todays world is that the Internet has created gray zones where laws are not specific enough to tell what is write and what is wrong.
There are a lot of moral and ethical issues with this case. First of all, we ALL know, you can download Torrent files though various sites. Google being one of the biggest (being the biggest search engin out there) but the TPB was specializing on it. So it was an easier target.
If TPB looses, then they should go after all the other search engines too, but here in lies the problem. Most of us knows, that will simply not happen.
Personally, I think the record industry is going at this the wrong way. I would go after the people who make real money from pirate movies. I mean real money. These guys made money sure, but most of that went to keep the things going. There are organizations out there who makes far more from coping, burning them and selling them on the streets around the world. Now those are the criminals!
But of course, they are far harder to catch. So I guess you go with the easy targets. I want to end with saying that personally, I love when people spread my stuff out. It promotes me. But thats just me. I am after all, a Swedish guy working and living in America.
Bingo - Google can hide behind the fact that it is a middle man between the User and the site, you don't actually download torrents from google itself...
I never said anything about the case, or which side i support in the post. Chillax bro.
Torrent files aren't illegal, not even in America. So the fact that you download torrents from TPB doesn't make them guilty in either countries.
I'm saying google is the middle man, that they don't hold any torrents on their server therefore won't come underfire by anyone. TPB does, This is why they are under fire. I am very upset with the ruling. But think about this, who are you going to get mad at?
The guy who points you to a guy who has what you need.. or the guy that gives it to you?
..If you don't understand this, don't reply.
Long Live TPB
(that is to say if "junior" still stands up for me in that era)
The reason this issues is so explosive is because of people's inability to view the problem from all angles. TPB is running under the purist idea of the data nexus. All they intend to do is connect people, and what you choose to transfer is none of their business. This is really not much different from the file sharing functions that you have with MSN or AOL messenger. Take down TPB, and you really should also go after Microsoft and AOL as well.
Regardless of our personal feelings, it is not acceptable for the judge and prosecutor to be members of the same advocacy group, especially when the case deals with the same issue that their group champions to others. You cannot be an impartial judge when you have already declared that you've sided with the same ideals as the prosecutor. Toss this verdict aside, and get an impartial judge. If TPB really is guilty, then it should be no problem securing that verdict again.
- by Basuto9 April 26, 2009 6:11 PM PDT
- I forgot to mention the MPAA has already filed suit in the US against IsoHunt, and has also convinced the judge in the DVD personal copy trial to close the trial and bar the public, including CNet reporters. The "reason" is alleged to be the discussion of DVD encryption information.
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