accadacca
11-04-2014, 10:13 AM
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/fredrik-arrest.jpg?w=1200
Proving that the long arm of the law doesn’t soften over time, the final founder of legendary file-sharing site The Pirate Bay to evade the police has now been caught. Fredrik Neij, known also as ‘TiAmo’, was arrested by border authorities in Thailand after attempting to enter the country from Laos, where he lives.
The Swede’s passport may have been revoked while an international arrest warrant hung over him, but TorrentFreak reports (http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-fredrik-neij-arrested-in-asia-141104) that he had journeyed into Thailand from Laos nearly 30 times since settling in the country in 2012 with his family. This time it seems he was spotted.
Neij is facing jail-time and a hefty fine back in his native Sweden. Back in 2009, he and fellow Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Warg and Peter Sunde were handed prison sentences (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/17/the-pirate-bay-trial-guilty-verdict) and around $7 million in fines after a Swedish court ruled that they were guilty of copyright infringements. The trio went into hiding following the ruling, but this year developments have finally caught up with them.
Sunde was arrested in June (http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/01/pirate-bay-peter-sunde-arrest/) after police tracked his location down to a farm in Sweden. Though he had moved on to found digital payment startup Flattr (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/is-flattr-the-new-facebook-like-but-this-time-with-real-money/), he is now serving an eight-month jail term. Last week, Warg, who spent a year and a half in Swedish custody after being nabbed in Cambodia, was sentenced (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29832318) to three and a half years in prison for an additional, hacking-related crime.
Neij has reportedly been transferred to Bangkok, from where he will presumably be moved back to Sweden to face the music.
Swedish authorities have gone after the trio despite calls for leniency. Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital, a VC firm that invested in Flattr, said at the time of Sunde’s arrest (http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/01/pirate-bay-peter-sunde-arrest/) that the pursuit of the Pirate Bay founders will be viewed as a “farce” in the future:
The fact that Peter has been arrested in order to serve out a criminal sentence for his role in The Pirate Bay is such a stark contrast to where other individuals are at the moment such as Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (two of the founders of Napster), or Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (two of the founders of Kazaa).
All of these others are heralded as tech visionaries, wunderkinds and positive disruptors for their respective roles in peer-to-peer development, file sharing and how technology has impacted users’ consumption of content and information. They are all now venture capital or angel investors, heralded as industry luminaries — and meanwhile two of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay are sitting in jail cells.
Past its tenth birthday, the Pirate Bay sails on. Now run by a self-declared non-profit group registered in the Seychelles, the site is proud of the many legal threats against and the fact that it has never removed a torrent, as the hall of fame (http://thepiratebay.se/legal) on its website shows.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/police-finally-arrest-the-third-and-final-founder-of-the-pirate-bay/
Proving that the long arm of the law doesn’t soften over time, the final founder of legendary file-sharing site The Pirate Bay to evade the police has now been caught. Fredrik Neij, known also as ‘TiAmo’, was arrested by border authorities in Thailand after attempting to enter the country from Laos, where he lives.
The Swede’s passport may have been revoked while an international arrest warrant hung over him, but TorrentFreak reports (http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-fredrik-neij-arrested-in-asia-141104) that he had journeyed into Thailand from Laos nearly 30 times since settling in the country in 2012 with his family. This time it seems he was spotted.
Neij is facing jail-time and a hefty fine back in his native Sweden. Back in 2009, he and fellow Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Warg and Peter Sunde were handed prison sentences (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/17/the-pirate-bay-trial-guilty-verdict) and around $7 million in fines after a Swedish court ruled that they were guilty of copyright infringements. The trio went into hiding following the ruling, but this year developments have finally caught up with them.
Sunde was arrested in June (http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/01/pirate-bay-peter-sunde-arrest/) after police tracked his location down to a farm in Sweden. Though he had moved on to found digital payment startup Flattr (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/is-flattr-the-new-facebook-like-but-this-time-with-real-money/), he is now serving an eight-month jail term. Last week, Warg, who spent a year and a half in Swedish custody after being nabbed in Cambodia, was sentenced (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29832318) to three and a half years in prison for an additional, hacking-related crime.
Neij has reportedly been transferred to Bangkok, from where he will presumably be moved back to Sweden to face the music.
Swedish authorities have gone after the trio despite calls for leniency. Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital, a VC firm that invested in Flattr, said at the time of Sunde’s arrest (http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/01/pirate-bay-peter-sunde-arrest/) that the pursuit of the Pirate Bay founders will be viewed as a “farce” in the future:
The fact that Peter has been arrested in order to serve out a criminal sentence for his role in The Pirate Bay is such a stark contrast to where other individuals are at the moment such as Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (two of the founders of Napster), or Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (two of the founders of Kazaa).
All of these others are heralded as tech visionaries, wunderkinds and positive disruptors for their respective roles in peer-to-peer development, file sharing and how technology has impacted users’ consumption of content and information. They are all now venture capital or angel investors, heralded as industry luminaries — and meanwhile two of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay are sitting in jail cells.
Past its tenth birthday, the Pirate Bay sails on. Now run by a self-declared non-profit group registered in the Seychelles, the site is proud of the many legal threats against and the fact that it has never removed a torrent, as the hall of fame (http://thepiratebay.se/legal) on its website shows.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/police-finally-arrest-the-third-and-final-founder-of-the-pirate-bay/