8. Support A Pirate

Last week, Pitchfork reported that the dudes behind the Swedish BitTorrent hub the Pirate Bay had been found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online. Judge Tomas Norstrom sentenced site founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom, and Peter Sunde each to a year in prison and ordered them to pay 30 million kronor (or about $3.54 million) in damages to various entertainment companies.

But Norstom may have been the wrong judge for this particular case. The Associated Press reports that early this morning, Sunde's lawyer Peter Althin said that he would demand a retrial. His reason: Norstom owned up to being a member of two copyright protection organizations, the Swedish Association for Copyright and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. (He's a board member for the latter.) The AP reports that Althin's case for conflict of interest was further bolstered by the fact that one of those groups also includes as members three people who represented the entertainment industry during the trial.

The AP quotes Althin as saying, "This is completely new to me. It is reasonable that we should have known about this before. It is a clear case of bias."

Norstom disagrees: "I don't think there are any circumstances that have made me biased in this case."

So how can we help a pirate in need?
Well check out the pirate bay blog HERE