Pirate Bay Retrial Plea Rejected

It's kinda interesting that a Judge did not reveal some of the groups he belongs too that would seem like a conflict of interest to most lay people. What do you think does something stink about this and do you think they should have a new trial?

A Swedish court has thrown out a request for a retrial by the four men behind The Pirate Bay website.

The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement in April and face jail sentences and hefty claims for damages.

The Pirate Bay's lawyers called for a retrial when it emerged that one of the judges in the case belonged to several copyright protection groups.

The Swedish court said the judge's affiliations did not bias the case.

The Svea Court of Appeal said Judge Tomas Norstrom should have declared that he was a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association before the case went to trial.

"The fact that he failed to shed light on this does not however mean that there was any wrongdoing during the proceedings that would require a retrial," said the court in a statement.

"This was not a case of bias," concluded the court.

No appeal is allowed against the judgement.

The Pirate Bay is well-known for hosting lists of websites where people can get pirated copies of movies, music, software and TV shows.

The Pirate Bay defended itself saying that it did not infringe copyright because none of the pirated material is stored on its servers.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

The four men behind The Pirate Bay, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, were sentenced to one year in jail and told to pay damages of 30m Swedish kronor (£2.3m, 2.7m euros) to entertainment companies such as Warner Bros and Sony Music Entertainment.

In response to the ruling Peter Sunde said The Pirate Bay would now file charges against Sweden for violating the human rights of the defendants.

You-Tube And Copyright

I don't know maybe I'm just dense, though I see this as causing a bit of a commotion given all the talk about it, I'm left with the thought, why not use a copyright that is domain specific? It seems to me, we are seeing basically turf wars over who has what rights to media, it's kind of funny and sad in a way, as the company's talk about their losses, but where does the artist come into play? At the same time the Internet and the media,mediums used, do not have to be seen as enemies of these company's, they can be a artist's or company's friends, just ask any artist who has embraced the Internet.

Digital culturus interruptus: Right here, right now, the almighty copyright finally comes home to roost by ZDNet's David Berlind -- Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Like teenagers biologically programmed to step across every boundary put in place by their parents, the digerati, equipped with the constantly evolving tools of their trade (everything from YouTube-like video sharing sites to widely available hacks of anti-piracy systems), have been been running a full-court press, brazenly [...]