Corruption: Judge in Pirate Bay trial linked to copyright groups
Corruption Watch
By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: April 23, 2009, 11:54 AM EST
Less than a week after The Pirate Bay's four co-founders were sentenced to
heavy fines and a year behind bars, some new information has come to light
that may result in the trial verdict being overturned. Turns out, Thomas
Norstr�m, the judge who presided over the case, is signed up to the Swedish
Copyright Association, which also counts among its members three attorneys
who represented the entertainment industry in the trial.
He also serves as a board member on the Swedish Association for the
Protection of Industrial Property, a group that lobbies for stricter
copyright regulations in the country. Norstr�m maintains that his
involvement with various copyright protection groups does not "constitute a
conflict of interest," adding that he participated in the associations in
order to stay informed about developments around copyright.
Interestingly enough, a juror was forced to step down during the trial due
to his involvement in a music rights group. The founders of the site were
already appealing the conviction but are now demanding a retrial. Whether or
not that happens, however, is up to Sweden's Court of Appeal.
Swedish police raided the company's offices several times and seized nearly
200 servers in 2006, temporarily shutting the site. But it resurfaced a
few days later with servers spread among different countries.
The site is still in operation.
Earlier this year, popular Swedesh BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay
announced they'd soon be offering an unlogged VPN tunneling service called
IPREDator, which they say will be priced somewhere around $6.80 a month. The
service takes aims at the new Swedish anti-piracy law IPRED (Intellectual
Property Rights Enforcement Directive) which gives copyright holders in
Sweden the ability to force ISPs in the country to hand over the names and
addresses of users who transmit pirated material. According to Threat Level,
more than 100,000 people have signed up for the new service so far. It's
expected to go live this week.
Some readers comments:
This whole thing is a joke. They got jail time and everything. And yet, here
in Scotland, we routinely refrain from jailing violent offenders because of
lack of court time, jail space, etc.
The judge didn't think to mention this "before" the trial began? These
courts don't have a clue what they're doing. I say just reverse the
conviction, drop the case, and stop wasting everyone's time.
In The United States, this is known as Government failed, People win.
In other words; the politicians and lawyers have no clue what they are
talking about. Many of them dont even use the internet.
No one ever downloaded a CD album from Pirate Bay.
"The Pirate Bay website allows users to search for and download BitTorrent
files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download
the data files from other users."
Pirate bay was "found guilty of being accessories to breaching copyright
laws". Google is an accessory to breaching copyright law on a much larger
scale. PC World is an accessory to breaching copyright law (selling
equipment and storage media to enable copying). The list of accessories to
breaching copyright law is enormous.
Pirate bay is just the tip of the iceberg which is still going to sink the
obsolete business model the entertainment industry clings to.
The fact that someone will download,say, a CD album from Pirate
Bay for nothing, does not mean that that same person would actually purchase
the album if it was not available foc. If not - then there is no loss.
There is undoubtedly some loss - but I suspect it is not as large as
claimed. It doesn't mean they share it either. Downloaders often block
uploading to save bandwidth.
As Pirate Bay is about sharing, maybe Pirate Bay 22,000,000 users should
share jail
sentence: few minutes each.
:)
peterwn
> Judge in Pirate Bay trial linked to copyright groups
>
> By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
> Published: April 23, 2009, 11:54 AM EST
>
> Less than a week after The Pirate Bay's four co-founders were sentenced to
> heavy fines and a year behind bars, some new information has come to light
> that may result in the trial verdict being overturned. Turns out, Thomas
> Copyright Association, which also counts among its members three attorneys
> who represented the entertainment industry in the trial.
>
The Scandinavian countries are among the world's least corrupt (along
with NZ for that matter). On this basis it is extremely unlikely that
the judge was corrupt. It may well be that the general lack of
corruption means that Swedis society is more tolerant of judges being
involved with 'other' activities than is traditional in the 'common
law' countries.