A Swedish appellate court ruled Thursday there would be no retrial in the Pirate Bay case, despite accusations the trial judge was biased against the four founders of the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker.

"We have reached the conclusion that we do not agree with the conflict of interest claim," Sweden Court of Appeal Judge Anders Eka told Swedish media. In the appellate court's written opinion, the three-judge panel said that backing "the principles" of copyright law "cannot be considered bias."

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement in April, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the five-year-old operation. They each face a year in prison and $3.8 million in fines.

Days after the April convictions, attorneys for the four charged that Tomas Norstrom, the judge presiding over the trial, was hostile to the defense because of his affiliations with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

The defendants also charged that the Stockholm trial court administrators secretly steered the case to Norstrom, an assertion the Stockholm court flatly denied.

The verdict triggered a political backlash among Swedish youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size to 40,000-plus members. Two weeks ago, the party won a seat in the European Parliament.

Christian Engström, who won that seat, blasted the decision Thursday.

"This is part of a pattern. It show that the Swedish legal system is no longer to be trusted when it comes to copyright cases. It's a travesty of justice quite simply," English-language Swedish media reported.

The Party Party's political success was also a reaction to the Swedish government's April implementation of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, known as IPRED. The law's main goal is to enable copyright holders to acquire once-private data identifying people linked to illegal file sharing. The Pirate Bay last week launched a VPN client to skirt that law. About 180,000 users have signed up for the $7-monthly encryption service.

In addition to one year of jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The case was brought by the Swedish government and Hollywood, in what’s best described as a joint civil-criminal trial. The defendants were charged with facilitating copyright infringement.

In denying the appeal, the court conceded that Judge Norstrom should have declared from the outset he was a member of the copyright groups, according to reports.

In the trial’s aftermath, several BitTorrent trackers across the globe have shuttered. The verdict has emboldened copyright authorities to crack down on torrent sites, and file sharing in Sweden has dropped. Mininova, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer, has begun moving toward legitimacy.

The Pirate Bay, with more than 20 million users, keeps operating as usual, despite the convictions. The four remain free. It was not immediatly clear what were their legal options following Thursday's decision.