Intellectual Property Law

Judge in Pirate Bay Appeal Removed for Bias

By David Kravets

The Pirate Bay saga took another twist Tuesday as one of the appellate judges set to hear the appeal of the co-founders’ criminal copyright convictions was removed over concerns of bias.

The Swedish judge in question, Fredrik Niemela, owns an unstated number of stock options in the music streaming service, Spotify, which has content deals with members of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Oddly, the content industry asked the Svea Court of Appeal to remove Niemela from the three-judge panel ahead of next month’s hearing. The industry said it wanted to ensure a fair hearing for the co-founders of the 5-year-old site who were convicted and sentenced to a year in jail for facilitating copyright infringement. The industry, however, fought calls for a mistrial amid allegations of judicial misconduct at the trial level.

The latest development comes as the fate of the co-founders remain in a liberty-limbo of sorts following their April convictions for running the world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracker. They remain free pending appeal.

The case was brought by the Swedish government and content industry in what best could be described as a joint criminal and civil proceeding.

Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström are the guilty parties.

The site’s future is also locked in the netherworld — as its proposed $8 million sale to Global Gaming Factory of Sweden remains stalled amid allegations that the announced purchase was a ruse to increase GGF’s penny stock price. We’ve suggested all along that the deal made no sense, that GGF had slim to no odds of converting millions of file sharers into legitimate, paying customers.

What’s more, adding drama to the ever-mutating Pirate Bay saga, a Stockholm lower court has ordered Sweden’s leading ISP to shutter The Pirate Bay, which lead to The Pirate Bay altering is DNS hosting service and going back online after a brief interruption.

In a statement Tuesday, meanwhile, the court of appeal said the disqualified judge is a “product developer” at Spotify. All said, the court concluded that the financial interests of the judge and Spotify “constitute grounds for questioning his impartiality.”

Still, the appeals court was untroubled by the lower-court judge who rendered the April convictions. He also had ties to various pro-copyright groups. But the court said Swedish trial court judges had a fundamental right to associate with whatever groups that fit their fancy.

However, there’s more. When the appellate court was reviewing whether the lower court judge was biased, the appeals court removed one of its judges for bias because of her membership in pro-copyright groups.

We didn’t make this up.

Hot nod: TorrentFreak

See Also:

• Pirate Bay Purchase Sinking
• Shareholders Approve Pirate Bay Purchase
• Vote: What’s Next for The Pirate Bay?
• The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome
• Pirate Bay Retrial Denied
• Pirate Bay Trial: The Hottest Ticket in Stockholm

Full post as published by Threat Level on September 29, 2009 (boomark / email).