Pirate Bay Judge: Conflict of Interest

Possible good news for the Swedish Pirates - according to a Swedish radio new program (link in Swedish, sorry), the judge in the case, Tomas Norström, has been a member of several of the same copyright protection organizations as some of the main entertainment industry representatives. These include:

Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) - This discussion forum that holds seminars, debates and releases the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review. Other members of this outfit: Henrik Pontén (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), Monique Wadsted (movie industry lawyer) and Peter Danowsky (IFPI).

Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR) - The judge sits on the board of this association that works for stronger copyright laws.

.SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) - Tomas Norström works for the foundation that oversees the .se name domain and advises on domain name disputes. His colleague at the foundation? Monique Wadsted. Wadsted says she’s never met Norström although they have worked together.

Ironically, during the trial it was the judge, Tomas Norström, who was responsible for ensuring that the trial was fair and that the lay judges did not have conflicts of interest. In fact, one of the original lay judges in the case had to step down due to his involvement with a music rights group.

“Three lay judges were appointed,” said Judge Norström one week before the trial. “On a question from me to the lay judges on whether they had any involvement in copyright associations or similar, or if they are or have been artists one of them answered Yes.”

That lay judge was removed. Now many are asking why the judge didn’t think the same should apply to him.

Following this news, there have been loud calls for a re-trial. Considering that this judge was responsible for throwing out all technical evidence and focusing only on intent, making the case considerably easier for prosecutors, it is absolutely necessary. And this time, how about a judge without copyright group connections?

Google is the New Pirate Bay

In my last post, regarding the conviction of four Swedes for maintaining a website which indexed torrents, I tossed off the comment that Google could be accused of the same thing.

Three days later, Mashable backs me up with this:

One of the claims from those defending and supporting The Pirate Bay in the recent trial (but also other similar sites), is that the entertainment industry is suing something that’s not much different from a search engine. Using Google’s Custom Search Engine, someone has created a Google based torrent search engine.

The idea is not by any means new; you could do this before by using certain types of queries (simply adding “filetype:torrent” to your query works), but it’s a nice time to spotlight the fact that yes, you don’t really need sites like Mininova or The Pirate Bay to find torrents; you can simply use Google which crawls thousands of torrent tracker sites, big and small, and get direct links to torrents. Want a screener of current hit, X-Men origins – Wolverine? Use this Google query and you’ve got it.

Is Google, then, the next in line to be sued for copyright infringement, or assisting in making copyright content available? If it weren’t too big to be sued, it probably would be.

So the Swedes didn’t do anything Google isn’t doing. Their real crimes? First: being honest about it. Second: being cocky, and giving the finger to the recording and motion picture industries. Third: being small and weak enough to be a target.

Yes, the entertainment industry is losing money to file sharing. Not as much as they claim, but some unquantifiable amount. To respond to the problem by having people thrown in jail is only to make them even more hateable, and further remove any remaining moral clarity from the question of whether to “steal” from them. And they only make matters worse by using file sharing as an all-encompassing excuse for their own sins – such as the undeniably low quality of their products year after year, price-gouging, ripping off the artists who supply their wares, cartel-style collusion, manipulating the public into repeatedly buying the same product…to name just a few. 

Most people have already rendered their verdict. The entertainment industry has been judged guilty, and now they’re paying the damages.

Swedish Pirates Convicted

As we covered March 5th in “Swedish Pirates on Trial“, today was verdict day for The Pirate Bay Four. The four defendants were accused of “assisting in making copyright content available”. This morning the verdict was returned.

Peter Sunde: Guilty
Fredrik Neij: Guilty.
Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty.
Carl Lundström: Guilty.
Each received 1 year in jail and $905,000 each in damages.

All four will appeal the decision.

The court said that the four were aware that copyrighted material was being shared using The Pirate Bay and that they made it easy and assisted the infringements. It categorized the infringements as “severe”. The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this.

Roger Wallis, who spoke in favor of The Pirate Bay at the trial, noted “This will cause a flood of court cases. Against all the ISPs. Because if these guys assisted in copyright infringements, then the ISPs also did. This will have huge consequences. The entire development of broadband may be stalled.”

Editorial note: you can find the same torrents in many other places, including Google. Presumably employees of Google will now be subject to fines in Sweden for torrents they list. Presumably the Swedes will also hold Google responsible when it lists pages containing libelous content, bomb-making instructions, hate speech, etc. etc.

The bottom line: this was a political prosecution, backed by powerful interests. It will be appealed, and hopefully higher courts will hold themselves to a higher standard – a legal standard perhaps. The Pirates are not perfect, but in this case they are right.