The judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial was biased has now been removed — for bias, of course.

The convoluted web of potential scandal further complicates the April 17 copyright infringement convictions of the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt was assigned to investigate whether the four should be granted a retrial based on revelations that the original trial judge is a member of industry copyright-protection groups. But Ihrfelt was removed from the case Wednesday amid allegations that she was a member of the same organizations, a Swedish newspaper reports.

The defendants charged that the Stockholm trial court secretly steered the case to Tomas Norstrom. The defendants claim Norstrom was hostile to the defense because of his affiliations with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

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.

Fredrik Wersall, the appellate court's president, said the claims of trial bias would be resolved "in a few weeks at the maximum."

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