Pirate Bay co-founder arrested in Cambodia

 Conal Urquhart and agencies

A founder of the Pirate Bay filesharing website has been arrested in Cambodia at the request of Swedish police.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, was detained in Phnom Penh by officers executing an international warrant issued against him in April after he did not turn up to serve a one-year jail sentence for copyright violations.

In Sweden, Warg's former defence lawyer Ola Salomonsson confirmed the arrest, according to the Aftonbladet website.

Warg and the site's co-founders – Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, and financier Carl Lundstroem – were convicted of encouraging copyright violations in 2009.

Neij, Sunde and Lundstroem all had their one-year jail terms reduced to between four and 10 months on appeal in 2010. They were also ordered to pay nearly $7m (£4.4m) in damages for copyright infringement to music and movie companies.

Warg did not appear at the appeal hearing, with his lawyer claiming he was too ill. The court upheld his sentence in his absence.

The operations of the Pirate Bay were mostly shut down in Sweden six years ago, but the website has continued to operate elsewhere.

The site was founded in 2003, and has more than 30 million users worldwide. It allowed users to share large files such as films and TV shows and was pursued by the film and music industry.

No copyright content is hosted on the site's web servers. Instead, it hosts links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers which makes it easy to avoid paying for items.

A police spokesman in Cambodia told the AFP news agency: "His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology.

"We don't have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case."
Guardian