Swedish Court Finalizes Jail Sentence For Pirate Bay Co-Founder

Mightee sends in this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million."

Comments

Re:...What was he doing in Cambodia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirate Bay was a lot smaller in 2006 and they had mostly adult ads, not the type of ads they have now. They also didn't employ as good shell company structure with their Seychelles company as they do now.

The income with torrent sites is currently around $50 per 1000 unique visitors, mostly from toolbar (those "download from fast server now"), usenet and vpn provider ads. TPB currently has global Alexa rank #84. Quantcast currently estimates TPB gets 200k unique visitors per day, and that is only US traffic. They get huge amount of traffic everywhere from the world. But just from that US traffic alone, TPB probably makes around 200000*(50/1000) = $10 000 per day.

That translates to $3 650 000 per year, almost four million dollars. And then you also have to add traffic and income from all the other countries apart from US, which probably brings the income close to ten million dollars a year.

Posted anonymously because I have also ran a torrent site. That means, I also know the kind of income such get from ads.

Re:Swedish Jail?

[Tsingi]

I'd heard they were more like upscale college dorms than prison cells.

forcing someone to live in a college dorm would be inhuman.

Re:Its $4.48m

[Kidbro]

As a Swedish resident I disagree. While I would certainly not want to go to jail, I wouldn't fear the time there, and I'm a 60kg geek that probably couldn't hold my own against a 12 year old girl.
A prison sentence is far from a luxury resort, but in general in prison violence is low here. Lacking a decent net connection (and being disconnected would be a terrible thing indeed) I'd spend my time in the library, reading up on what I'm curious about, or simply ploughing through the classics I've missed. I doubt I'd have much trouble with other inmates.
A million dollar debt though - that would destroy my life.

I suspect the same is true for Anakata.

Re:...What was he doing in Cambodia?

[migla]

If the founder in question here was making huge numbers off TPB a few years ago (2008, maybe), it didn't show in his wardrobe, hairstyle or choice of place to crash or his mode of transportation.

I saw him staying with friends in one of the socio-economically crappiest suburbs of Stockholm and taking the subway wherever he was going.

I'm not saying he wasn't a millionaire, but if he was, it was like some character said in some (iirc) Tzingiz Aitmatov story:
"I'm just a poor person with lots of money".

I think this person is a principled person. I might be wrong, but this is the vibe I got from happening to pass him by on the street a few years ago.