Did you hear about the Pirate Bay piracy trial in Sweden?

[thewayne]

Pirate Bay is a torrent tracking network based in Sweden but it's distributed with servers around the world. They do not host illegal content (movies, MP3s, whatever) nor does stolen content pass through their servers, but they point to people that share it via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Sweden has fairly loose laws regarding piracy, and it was popularly believed that there wasn't much of a chance that they would be found guilty.

Well, they were convicted and face 1-2 years in jail each and some fairly whopping fines.

Guess what? Turns out that the judge is a member of two copyright lobbying organizations. So were the prosecuting lawyers.

Here, that's be an immediate mistrial. There? Dunno. I'm rather surprised that the defense attorneys did not discover this about the judge and force a mistrial and a change.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1159216&art_pos=2

Comments

[silveradept]

Wow. Clearly stacked deck there. Can Pirate Bay make an appeal on those grounds and have their convictions dismissed?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Some of the Slashdot comments were very illuminating. Several posters were from Sweden, apparently a serious criminal case goes through more than one trial, the first one is sort of a basic qualifier and the defense might have let the judge's affiliation slide in order to see all of the offense evidence so they'll have a stronger defense for the second trial.

Interestingly, either the original judge or an assistant to the judge, I'm not entirely clear based on the comments, was dismissed because he was a composer! And not only was the judge a member of the two organizations apparently he is on the boards!

[silveradept]

Wow, so this one really was a stacked deck. Hopefully, the defense got the prosecution to lay out their entire case so they could properly defend it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I think it was definitely a stacked deck. Somehow that judge was selected to preside over that trial and his affiliations was probably known to those who appointed him. But the apparent cascading of the Swedish legal system might work against the Hollywood-directed **AA organizations with their expectation that they might be able to stack the deck like an American case.

[silveradept]

Hrm. So for the preliminary, they got the sympathetic judge to bring the prosecution's material out onto the table, but for the actual trial, they'll select a neutral, knowledgeable party to preside. At least, that's the hope.