MOSCOW, November 26 (RAPSI) – Cofounder of the file-sharing website Pirate Bay Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and hosting provider PRQ are defendants in several online piracy cases being heard in the Moscow City Court, Kommersant business newspaper reports Tuesday.

In June 2013, a Swedish court found Warg, 27, guilty of fraud for hacking mainframes to make illegal money transfers and sentenced him to two years in prison. In Russia, he has been charged with posting Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad drama film and the Interns Russian medical sitcom on Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv.

Several Russian media holding companies, including VGTRK, Gazprom Media, Central Partnership, Amedia, Non-Stop Production and Star Media, filed complaints against Gottfrid Warg and PRQ, Kommersant writes.

In October and November the court upheld four of the eight suits filed against him.

The Pirate Bay was established in November 2003 and is among 100 most popular websites in the world. It provides torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer audio and video file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. The site operates in 30 languages, including Russian.

In 2006, Swedish police shut down the website and confiscated its computers and servers over alleged copyright violations, but several days later the site was up and running again. It now uses servers located outside Sweden.