Peter Sunde, the co-founder of file-sharing site Pirate Bay who has been on the run from authorities for over two years, was tracked down by police in Sweden and arrested this past weekend. Sunde and three other members of the Pirate Bay were sentenced to a year-long prison sentence in 2012 after being convicted of numerous copyright violations involving the peer-to-peer file-sharing site. Sunde’s sentence –the result of the first and only time a file-sharing case resulted in criminal charges – was later reduced to eight months, but he fled while his legal team appealed the punishment. Interpol had since been on the hunt for Sunde.
According to Reuters, authorities in the southern Swedish county of Skane arrested Sunde on Saturday, but officials provided no other details. “We have been looking for him since 2012,” Swedish National Police Board spokeswoman Carolina Ekeus said. “He was given eight months in jail so he has to serve his sentence.” Another Pirate Bay co-founder who fled his prison sentence, Gottfrid Svartholm Wang, was apprehended in Cambodia in 2012 and extradited back to Sweden. Pirate Bay financier Carl Lundstroem served his sentence without incident, while co-founder Fredrik Neij is still on the run, TechCrunch reports. The four men were also ordered to pay $7 million for the countless copyright violations.
“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes,” Sunde said when first convicted in 2009. Following the sentencing of the four men, the Pirate Bay went on a brief hiatus before returning under new ownership out of Seychelles, an African island nation in the Indian Ocean.