One of the laywers representing the men convicted in the Pirate Bay trial has called for a retrial after reports that the judge was a member of copyright protection organisations in Sweeden. The judge in the Pirate Bay case has been a member of several of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, the Sweedish newspaper The Local reported today.

Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has announced that he plans to demand a retrial.

He said that the specific judge should had been excluded in order to prevent a conflict of interest.

Pirate Party chairman Rickard Falkvinge has called for the verdict to be scrapped.

One of the groups of which the Pirate Bay judge is a signed up member is Svenska f?reningen f?r upphovsr?tt ('the Swedish Copyright Association'), where he is joined by Henrik Pont?n, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay. He is also sitting on the board of Svenska f?reningen f?r industriellt r?ttsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws.

The lawyers of the defendants in the the Pirate Bay case have already filled an appeal against the guilty verdict of the Stockholm district court, which has ordered the four involved in running popular BitTorrent tracker to pay US$3.6 million in damages.