In some funny news today it seems the judge in the trial of The Pirate Bay might not have been fair and impartial.

According to a report from P3, a Swedish radio show the (dis)honorable judge Tomas Norström belongs to several IP and Copyright protection groups, in fact the same organizations that the persons that represented the entertainment industry sat on.

This could be a rather large break for The Pirate Bay, as in many legal experts opinions it is clearly a conflict of interests. If Judge Norstrom's decision is overturned a completely new trial will have to be conducted.

Read more here.

One legal expert familiar with the situation believes that the associations that Judge Tomas Norström [Norstrom] has are clearly a conflict of interest when it comes to such a case that relates to copyright infringement. He says that a retrial is definitely a possibility but the lawyers will have to exercise that option as soon as possible.

One of the groups of which Norström is a member of is The Swedish Copyright Association, where he is joined by Henrik Ponten, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay. The judge also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, which is a group that fights for more harsh copyright legislation.