Pirate Bay founders denied retrial

The founders of the Pirate Bay website have been denied a retrial.

Four men jailed for their involvement in a file-sharing website will not be given a retrial, it has been reported.

In April, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sundewere, who founded the Pirate Bay, were sentenced to a year each in prison.

They were also ordered to pay millions of pounds in damages to a number of entertainment companies by a judge in Sweden.

Following the verdict, international lawyers acting on behalf of the men demanded a retrial, arguing that the judge may have had a conflict of interest.

They pointed out that Tomas Norstrom was a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property.

A second judge, Ulrika Ihrfelt, was appointed and was subsequently removed from the trial amid further allegations of bias.

The Swedish Court of Appeal has now ruled that Mr Norstrom, the original judge, was not ruling from a biased point of view when he sentenced the men to jail.

A new trial has therefore been ruled out, although the website founders will still be able to appeal the initial verdict.

Around 22 million people are estimated to have used the Pirate Bay to download copyrighted music and film content without paying for it.

Commenting on the intellectual property issue recently, Sean Adams, founder and editor of online music magazine Drowned in Sound, said that web users will continue to download music illegally as long as it is easy to do so.