Three judges are currently reviewing the judge that handled the Pirate Bay trial to discover if he was biased or not. No decision has yet been made but the New York Times and several other publications report inaccuracies and plain wrongs that claim otherwise. Time to get the facts straight.

Pirate Bay judge Tomas Norström’s objectivity has been called into doubt by the defense lawyers because of his ties to national and international pro-copyright lobby groups. To investigate these accusations of bias, the appeal court appointed a judge, Ulrika Ihrfelt.

Her task is to decide whether or not Norström’s verdict could have been biased since this issue must be resolved before they can move on to the appeal request. If it’s determined that Norström was indeed biased, the case will be resubmitted to the district court for retrial, meaning that an appeal is not needed at this stage.

Earlier this week the District Court of Stockholm handed in their statement to the Appeal Court, arguing that they don’t believe that Norström was biased. This was not really a surprise since they appointed him and admitting that he is biased would be admitting to having made a mistake before the “bias case” is reviewed.

However, many publications mistakenly concluded from this statement that a ruling was made on the bias issue, or even worse.

“The four men convicted for operating file-sharing site the Pirate Bay suffered a further setback this week when they failed to get the case thrown out because of alleged bias by the sentencing judge,” the Hollywood reporter wrote.

This was picked up and twisted even further by none other than The New York Times who reported: “A Swedish court has denied the appeal of four men convicted of violating copyright law for their involvement in the Pirate Bay.”

Several other large and smaller publications wrote similar articles this week, concluding that the court “ruled” that the Pirate Bay judge was not biased or that an appeal was off the table. The truth is that the Appeal Court still has to decide whether or not the judge is biased. The only thing that happened this week is that the District Court handed it their statement.

Appeal Court Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt, who was taken off the bias case previously, but will be involved in an eventual appeal told a local newspaper this week: “The biggest challenge will probably be the enormous amount of media attention at the trial. I haven’t been in media’s spotlights before, so this is a new experience for me.”

The biggest challenge for the media on the other hand, is to get their facts straight instead of writing up nonsense. Props to our friend David Kravets at Wired who was one of the few who got it right.