Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm in 2009. Photo: boklm/Flickr
It turns out that last week’s arrest of The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm seems to be unrelated to his pending one-year prison sentence for running Sweden’s and the world’s most notorious and illicit file-sharing service.
Swedish media is reporting that Svartholm’s confinement in Cambodia is in connection to a 2010 hack into a Swedish company called Logica. Logica contracts with Swedish tax authorities, and “tax numbers of 9,000 Swedes leaked online” earlier this year, notes TorrentFreak, a prominent source when it comes to The Pirate Bay news.
Two other Swedes have been arrested in relation to the Logica hack.
Sweden’s Supreme Court in February upheld the prison sentences of the four men convicted of running The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde faces eight months; Fredrik Neij, 10 months; Carl Lundström, four months; and Gottfrid Svartholm, one year. They share combined fines of more than $6.8 million. They have not yet been ordered to serve their time.
They were convicted in 2009 in a joint civil and criminal proceeding in Sweden that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants and the torrent-based file-sharing site, which points the way to free games, movies, software and music. The service is used by millions and is notorious for its rebellious nature.
Their failed defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way the bittorrent protocol works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay’s servers. Instead the site provides a searchable index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user’s client software to the content elsewhere.
Cambodian authorities, who arrested Svartholm at his apartment in the capital of Pnom Penh, where he was living, are said to be planning to eventually deport him to Sweden. Once there, he is likely to face hacking charges.
According to Swedish site DN.se, Svartholm was in “poor condition, weighing less than 40 kg and with serious drug problems.”