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Pirate Bay defendants set course for retrial

Nate Lanxon CNET UK

Published: 23 Apr 2009 15:55 BST

Just days after The Pirate Bay's anti-piracy trial resulted in a guilty verdict, a Swedish radio station has claimed that judge Tomas Norström was biased, owing to his involvement in numerous copyright-focused organisations.

Norström, P3 News reported on Thursday, sits on the board of the Swedish Association for Industrial Property — a group founded in 1908 that, according to a translation of its Swedish website, "promotes interest in and knowledge of industrial property protection, particularly patent rights". It has also pushed for stronger copyright law, P3 News reports.

Norström is also a member of the Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) — a group founded in 1954 that hosts seminars and debates, and counts members from the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (one member of which sits on the SFU's board), the Swedish Federation of Musicians, and a movie industry lawyer.

The SFU claims its main task is "to safeguard and promote the member companies' copyrights to their films, [and] a part of this work is to educate and inform the public about copyright importance".

Also on the board of the SFU is Peter Danowsky, a lawyer whose emails to the IFPI have previously been published by The Pirate Bay itself.

In response to P3 News's allegations, Norström said: "I have not felt that I am biased because of those commitments."

Defendant Peter Sunde's legal representative in the trial, Peter Althin, disagreed, saying the judge's commitments to these organisations constituted a conflict of interests, and the defendants would demand a retrial.

Credit: Pirate Bay judge biased? Defendants set course for retrial from CNET UK