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