Was the judge in the Pirate Bay case biased?

Last week, I wrote about the verdict in The Pirate Bay case in Sweden. This week, it turns out that judge Thomas Norström may have connections to a few organizations that might call into question his objectivity. The Register reports that there is evidence to link the judge to the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. Both of these organizations lobby for stronger copyright protection laws.

In case you forgot, the guilty verdict against The Pirate Bay was for a charge saying the company had assisted in copyright infringement. The Swedish court sentenced the four founders to a year in prison and fined them $3.59 million U.S. in damages. That might seem like a pretty severe punishment. Could the severity be linked to the judge’s association with the copyright protection organizations?

At least one lawyer for the four founders has argued that the judge’s involvement with the copyright lobbies calls for a retrial of the case.

My take on this is that the judge does seem to have a conflict of interest in this case and should not have presided over it. I’m not convinced that if the Pirate Bay had faced a truly objective judge that the outcome would have been significantly different. The Pirate Bay has cultivated a very controversial image. Should the case go to trial again, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the guilty verdict as a result. But perhaps the punishment would be less severe.

And I still think finding the founders guilty at all leads to a slippery slope. At what point are sites that provide links assisting copyright infringement? At what point are they just search engines? I don’t think there’s a firm line between the two camps, and I’m sure we’ll see more messy lawsuits in the future as a result.

Learn more at HowStuffWorks.com:

How BitTorrent Works
How Copyrights Work
How Intellectual Property Works