Neowin readers will almost certainly be familiar with the controversial case concerning the owners of famous BitTorrent tracking website "The Pirate Bay", and the Swedish court of appeal. Today it was announced that the four founders of the site will not be allowed a retrial on the matter, the sentence passed initially being final.
Initial accusations of the judge who presided during the train being biased against the four pirates have been quashed. These accusations came just days after the initial trial in April of this year, stating that the judge presiding over the trial, Thomas Nostrom, behaved in a hostile manner to the defense, due to his affiliations with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.
In response to these allegations the appellate judge, Anders Eka, released the following statement to members of the Swedish media:
"We have reached the conclusion that we do not agree with the conflict of interest claim."
The appellate court"s panel of three judges went further to say that the backing of the "principles" of copyright law "cannot be considered bias."
The Pirate Bay administrators, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde have been found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement, along with Carl Lundström who was convicted of funding the operation, these sentences were drawn in April.
Whilst good for the communities representing the rights of those whose work is copyrighted, this trial has caused a backlash amongst the Swedish youth, resulting with some 40,000+ members of the Swedish Pirate Party backing the defendants. Recently the party have won a seat in the European Parliament.