The Pirate Bay case only covered 34 copyrighted works and the Pirate Bay didn't even share any copyrighted files, they just helped people who wanted to share them find each other. If you have an online advertisement site and some people use it to advertise stolen goods, whom should be punished hardest - the owners of the site who weren't aware of the specific case and not contacted about it or the person trying to sell the stolen good?

Yes, their Swedish top candidate Christian Engström is actually a former anti-software patent activist for FFII. Both of the two biggest parties in Sweden has clearly shown in the past that they don't understand this issue, so it's great to be represented by the Pirate Party in the European Parliament. Especially since the Swedish government says that they'll prioritize the issue of making it possible to get EU-wide patents this autumn (the software patent supporters will sure see that as their chance to once again push their questionable agenda).

Yes, that's true and people are well aware of that. It was the former minister of justice, Bodström, who pushed for it. In Sweden we no longer talk about 1984, but rather the "Bodström society" ever since an influential blogger coined this expression.

That's why lots of people find that they can neither vote for the parties that supported the former government nor the current government parties, and instead give their votes to the Pirate Party.

One of these, a member of an artists' interest organization, was forced by Mr. Norström to resign from the trial for potential bias

I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration. Probably Mr. Norström discussed it with him and he hade his own decision to resign.

Well, if three persons cannot pay up the forth person has to pay their share too. In normal cases damages of this size is a life-time sentence to minimal living standards. I'd say the one year in prison seems quite little in comparison to that.

The Piraty Party in Sweden are reporting a rapid increase of new members after the verdict. At some time the increase was in the order of one new member every forth second (!). In terms of member count they are now the second biggest opposition party and will soon have more members than one of the parties being part of the government. See diagrams here: http://rickfalkvinge.se/

... speaking about statistics don't forget the membership statistics for the swedish Pirate Party: http://www.piratpartiet.se/partiet/medlemsstatistik-admin Notice any trend the last couple of days?