The people behind The Pirate Bay were convicted and sentenced to jail (apart from a ridiculously high amount of damages to be paid)… but what happens next?
They have all appealed, and the appeal (which probably will be accepted and taken to a new trial) will take place in about a year… so – for now – the convicted won’t have to face jailtime.
Now, it seems the judge that handled the case might have been biased. He is member of two organizations: The Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection.
This makes him – in my eyes at least – totally biased and not suitable to judge in a case involving copyright. But if Judge Norstrom was truly an impartial, brilliant, expert judge, might he have not offered the following quote: “This is a sensitive case. So before I agreed to hear it, I asked some of my fellow judges whether they considered that I would be in a position of conflicting interests. Two judges said absolutely not. While a third said he wasn’t quite so sure. I went with the majority.”
This says it all, doesn’t it?
On another note, the people convicted actually had a website much like google (albeit much much smaller).. their site (www.thepiratebay.com) contains a search engine and listings to torrent files. They don’t host files. They were convicted for “facilitating” torrent files to the public. So what does Google do? The exact same thing.
That’s why some clever guy registered the name thepirategoogle.com. Where he (or she) uses google to search for torrents. This website has the exact same functionality as the Pirate Bay – it uses Google’s search engine to “facilitate torrent files” to people searching for torrents. It seems, however, that media companies are a bit afraid to sue Google, aren’t they?
