They have conflicts of interest in Swedish judges as well

By Stina Backer April 26, 2009 The Independant.uk Sunday

A retrial has been demanded by the lawyers for the file-sharing website Pirate Bay after it emerged the judge who sentenced its founders to jail for making copyrighted material available for download has links with pro-copyright organisations.

The judge in the Pirate Bay case, Thomas Norström is reported to be a member of the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU) where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against the BitTorrent tracker site.

He also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR), an organisation that lobbies for tougher copyright laws, reports Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme today.

Despite today’s reports judge Norström denied that his involvement with the two copyright organisations constituted a “conflict of interest” in his ability to preside over the most high-profile trial involving illegal filesharing in European history.

“Every time I take on a case I assess the chances for any recusation, but in this case I don’t believe that my impartiality was affected,” said Norström.

Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde strongly disagrees and is calling for a retrial. He argues that the defence should have had an opportunity to review the circumstances before the start of the trial.

“In the autumn I received information that a lay judge could have similar connections. I sent these to the court and the judge was excluded in order to prevent a conflict of interest. It would have been reasonable to then review this situation as well,” Althin said.

“I will point this out in my appeal, then the Court of Appeal will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” Althin added.

The defendants, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were found guilty on 33 specific charges of making files accessible for illegal sharing. They have also been ordered to pay a fine of SEK30million (£2m) and have been sentenced to one year in prison.

Throughout the trail the defendants Twittered their version of events, something for which they received much criticism. But after hearing the news about judge Norström’s connections this morning Peter Sunde – aka BrokeP – couldn’t resist a cheeky Tweet on the matter: “Oh how I love the smell of victory in the morning.”

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