MOSCOW, May 20 (RAPSI) – The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is presently embroiled in what has been described as Sweden’s largest ever hacking case, Swedish news agency The Local reported Monday.
He is accused of having carried out a lengthy hacker attack against Logica, a Swedish IT firm, by means of which he gained access to scores of personal data, according to the report, which added that Logica is in the business of providing public agencies with data from Sweden’s population registry.
En route to the courtroom Monday, Prosecutor Henrik Olin said "This is, I believe, the largest hacking case ever in Sweden… We're talking about customer information, information from the Sweden debt Enforcement Agency (Kronofogden), and a large number of police officers' organizational affiliations,” The Local reported, citing an interview with TT News Agency.
Meanwhile, Warg is still in the process of serving out an earlier sentence for copyright infringement.
Two of The Pirate Bay’s other cofounders recently suffered a setback in Strasbourg in March when the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR] upheld the earlier conviction.
In 2009, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi were sentenced alongside Warg to one year in prison for complicity in sharing, or allowing others to share, torrent files.
Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi subsequently lodged an appeal with the ECHR, arguing that their conviction "had breached their freedom of expression". They alleged that they "could not be held responsible for other people's use of [The Pirate Bay], the initial purpose of which was merely to facilitate the exchange of data on the Internet.
According to them, only those users who had exchanged illegal information on copyright-protected material had committed an offence", reads the ECHR press release.
The ECHR ruled that the Swedish courts "had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake - the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright - when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded."
The Pirate Bay allows users to exchange digital material such as music, films, and computer games.
The project was founded in November 2003 and soon The Pirate Bay became one of the hundred most popular sites in the world. In 2006 the Swedish authorities tried to cut the operation of their torrent tracker short by confiscating their servers, but it started up again soon after the police raid. The Pirate Bay's server was later moved out of Sweden.