Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested In Sweden

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde's arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site's founders." From the article: "While details are scarce at the moment, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reports that the arrest has been confirmed by the Swedish authorities. According to Peter Althin, Sunde’s lawyer, the news means that his client will most likely be sent to prison to serve his 8-month sentence. Sunde’s prison sentence was made final in 2012 after Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay."

Comments

His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

Or some trumped up charges that they can make stick? Running a site based on user content, ( remember they didn't house any files ) should not be considered a crime.

They really did nothing more than lets say, Slashdot..

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

Yes, the innocent are never imprisoned for political reasons.

Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were imprisoned for political reasons. This guy is being imprisoned because he helped to facilitate media piracy on a mass scale. You may disagree with that outcome but please don't try and paint him as some sort of oppressed political dissent.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy.

You may think it should be perfectly legal, or that it should be a civil matter (this is where I fall, FWIW) rather than a criminal one, but no matter what your opinion you do "the cause" a disservice when you conjure up images of Gandhi or Mandela, which is what comes to mind for most people when they hear "political prisoner".

Re:His 'role in the site'

[blahplusplus]

"Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime."

The original crime was monopoly, Intellectual property and it's believers are the biggest scam going. The people who originally wrote copyright didn't expect it'd become eternal.

Look at the following chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Arker]

"One assumes that if the man was convicted of a "crime" in Sweden, than what he did was against Swedish Law..."

Except it was already pretty well established that what they were doing was perfectly legal under Swedish law and they had been operating quite openly for some time until Hollywood got real annoyed and DC phoned in threatened sanctions.

Then suddenly they had US-style SWAT raids on a bunch of geeks (this kind of treatment the Swedish Police do not typically resort to even when dealing with Russian Mafia) and a judge who ruled that it did not matter that what they actually *did* was legal, because their *intent* was not. Think about that for a second.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[craigminah]

What if TPB was a website that linked people together to buy/sell crack, would that be ok? TPB facilitated crimes...even if you don't like copyright laws, without them we'd have a lot less quality stuff as incentives to produce would be diminished.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Arker]

"You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy. "

There was no piracy involved or even alleged. He never raised a cutlass, boarded a skiff, or ravished a prisoner.

You unjustly honor the term 'pirate' when you apply it to someone whose crime was facilitating communication.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

Sorry, this is a bullshit argument. The administrators set out to create a site to assist in piracy, hence their name, hence their advertising that you can find TV shows, movies, etc on the site. It's not even a secret. You are either engaging in sophistry or are naive to claim they are a neutral "common carrier" status.

Since you are either playing dumb or otherwise, here it is, spelled out for you:

As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden's pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm's servers to launch the Swedes' BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. "I hacked a company's service provider and put up obscene messages," says Neij. "The company said work for us or we prosecute." Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, "Because I could!"

By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named "Peter"), the site had effectively outgrown its host. "We had no idea it would happen," says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. "It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker."

With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: "We don't want to reform copyright lawâ"we just don't want the state to enforce it."

Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about "how value is produced in the cultural sector." He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. "This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century," he says. "Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically."

Does that sound like a neutral ISP to you?

That's not true and you know it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop playing semantic games. "Data" is a highly abstract and generalized categorization of things that, for every practical difference, are worlds apart.

An anonymous posting on a blog is *not the same thing* as a musical piece that required a lot of talent and upfront costs to produce. Though both can be stored as data, they are as different as night and day.

The level of control asserted over data, by the wealthy entrenched powers, is precisely the level of control that the unwashed masses choose to abide. If enough people really and truly believed that information should be free, the amount of political and economic force they could bring to bear (with relatively little effort) would change the laws and the balance of power.

Individual acts of defiance might get some media attention, but that is about it. You can't change the system that way. You can change the system through, and only through, large groups of people that agree with you.