[ColinWright]

From Google translate ...

Peter Sunde arrested in Skåne

One of the brains behind the file sharing site The Pirate Bay has been arrested.

Peter Sunde, 35, was arrested today in a raid in southern Sweden.

- He has been on the run since 2012 , says Carolina Ekéus , press contact at NCIS .

Rikskriminalen state that Peter Sunde has been wanted by Interpol and that he is now arrested.

- He was arrested for him to serve a prison sentence of eight months. It's about the Pirate Bay case , says Caroline Ekéus .

Expressen says that the raid took place at a farm in Skåne Tonganoxie . According to the newspaper shall Polish police and skånsk picket police have participated in the arrest . Sentenced to prison

Peter Sunde were sentenced for aiding copyright infringement along with two other men in the Svea Court of Appeal in November 2010. Together sentenced Pirate Bay founders in addition to prison to pay damages of around 46 million.

In its judgement, the Court of Appeals held that the men through file-sharing site The Pirate Bay " has facilitated illegal file sharing in a way that lead to penalties for those who run the service ."

Peter Sunde has repeatedly applied for revision of the Supreme Court , most recently in February this year. He also refers to new cases from the European Court which deals with how to assess aiding and abetting . "Deeply unhappy '

Peter sundes defender Peter Althin says to Aftonbladet that he still finds it difficult to accept the verdict .

- Has a final judgment , you have to enter and serve this . I kväljer them but I still think that the judgement is deeply unfortunate and inaccurate when it comes to him. There was nothing that showed that he had an active part in this as he was sentenced for, says Peter Althin.

He says that an open prison now awaits Peter Sunde.

- It does not get Kumla Security or something like that. It will be a little more open prison and that will happen pretty soon, says Peter Althin.

[anaphor]

"Together sentenced Pirate Bay founders in addition to prison to pay damages of around 46 million."

Yeah, that's never going to happen. The prosecutor in their case came up with some fantastical amount of money TPB is supposed to have made, but it's complete nonsense (see the documentary TPB: AFK for details).

[bjourne]

That's in SEK so about 5m € or 7m $. Nobody knows how much money they made or even has an estimate. But they did have lots of advertising for years on one of the worlds most popular sites and their costs for running it were minimal. They are bound to have made something from it.

[fredsted]

>costs for running it were minimal

What makes you say that?

[tptacek]

One possible stab towards a response is to observe that the cost for most popular sites is dominated by headcount costs, and TPB didn't have a large headcount.

[belorn]

Looking at the budget for Wikipedia, I can not see a headcount cost. There is hardware and bandwidth costs, which should be very similar to the running costs TPB had when the trio ran it.

[tjmc]

Wikipedia has no ads though. Big difference.

[zz1]

They also had to buy new servers a few times.

[XorNot]

That's still 10-20k tops.

[bjourne]

There's a quote from 2006 saying that their monthly hosting costs where 15k SEK (2k USD). But also, one of the owners of the hosting company was also the one running the tpb site.

[thefreeman]

They were not even at the height of their popularity in 2006. And that (very new) hosting company was raided and all 190 of their machines were confiscated, even though only 11 were being used by TPB.

They scaled up a lot from that point too, so that is not an accurate picture of their costs at all.

[funkyy]

I think you need to do your research. Those guys are pretty packed. Their DC alone is money making like crazy. I know few folks that actually used their hosting services ~2 years ago - their pricing is among highest in industry. Also they have dozens of small projects running. TPB is running ads etc - what would be cost of running, 10 dedicated servers? And what would be the income? Around few hundred thousands?

[belorn]

I assume you got tax records to support that PRQ is earning money like crazy? I am going to assume that the tax collectors know their job and is not letting a crazy revenue source continue going untaxed.

For TPB advertisement, do you have numbers on how competitive advertisement space is for a website like the pirate bay? Would startups here forexample be willing to pay top dollars for ads there? Willing to use untraceable methods to pay for it?

I personally have a hard time seeing either PRQ or TPB as massive revenue sources at this point in time.

[thaumasiotes]

What's the point of using untraceable methods to pay for advertising? Won't your name be right there in the ad?

[dewey]

The companies advertising in places like this are usually not exactly the ones with a legit business address and a great track record of being transparent.

The money made from ads is probably a lot less than the ad revenue you know from other places, there are a lot of middlemen, ad networks, and money services involved and everyones takes their cut.

[belorn]

The advertiser might be willing to put down his name, but what about the person/persons on the other end. No one knows who is running TPB at this time, nor where the servers are. If that information would leak through paper-trails, you can be sure legal actions would be sent their way by a number of anti-piracy groups. Questions about taxes and damages could also pop up depending on whom is running TPB and from where.

[zz1]

If running TPB was such a lucrative activity as you assume, why would they hand TPB over to the Pirate Party to run? If you watch the movie (TPB AFK), you'll surely get that they weren't in it for the money, and that they don't even know if they made some money out of it.

[sleepyhead]

The verdict is clear and has been passed. Whether you think it is complete nonsense is irrelevant.

[sleepyhead]

Getting downvoted... Interesting to see that HN readers think their views is more more important than the rule of law. I'm not saying the verdict is correct. But debunking it as complete nonsense and "that's never going to happen" is a clear misconception how the world and the legal system works.

[anaphor]

(FYI I didn't downvote you)

The reason I said that it's never going to happen is because they are simply unable to pay that amount back. They can't just pull millions out of thin air correct? So I think it's reasonable to conclude it will probably never get paid, at least not in full.

[ArcticCelt]

Can he just fill for bankruptcy to clear the damages?

[oliwary]

Not bankruptcy, but "skuldsanering", which resembles "debt relief order" in English.

It is a system for heavily indebted people to free themselves of their debt after living on a minimum for five years. It also includes damages due to crimes. [1] It is pretty rare however (5357 in 2013)[2].

There are two requirements: The person has to be indebted enough to not be able to pay off the debt in the foreseeable future, and the procedure has to be reasonable with regards to the personal and economical circumstances of the person.[3] This includes the age of the debt, why they came up and if the person has worked to pay them off.

[1] https://lagen.nu/dom/rh/1996:33 [2] http://www.kronofogden.se/20136.html [3] https://lagen.nu/2006:548 [4] http://www.kronofogden.se/Vemkanfaskuldsanering.html

[Tombone5]

From my reading of the fastställda tingsrättsdomen I note that they mention this excpetion being granted on a case by case basis, and considering Sunde is not a reformed alcoholic with a debth from a accident caused by his addiction it seems unlikely the case you refer to proves more than the existence of the exception.

[oliwary]

Indeed. My point was only that skuldsanering would free him from the damages, not that it is necessarily applicable in this case.

[Tomte]

Without knowing Swedish law, I'm rather certain he cannot.

Personal bankruptcy is usually out of the question for debts arising from unlawful behaviour. You cannot evade damages or a penalty imposed by a court just by filing bankruptcy.

Imagine a legal system where you could. Preposterous.

[sergiosgc]

In my country you can. There is also a 20 year limit to prison sentences, no matter the crime. The objective of the judicial system is not to punish but to recover dysfunctional society members. As such, it makes no sense to punish anyone with a life sentence, no matter the type (prison or fiduciary).

[Crito]

> There is also a 20 year limit to prison sentences, no matter the crime.

That seems mildly misleading. Sentences can be extended beyond 20 years as long as the person is still believed to be dangerous to society.

[sergiosgc]

Not in Portugal. They may extend to 25 by accumulation, but other than that, the limit is absolute.

You may conclude that someone is insane and force them to be institutionalized, but that is not prison, and the decision is not ever final.

[yashosky]

@sergiosgc: Which country is that?

[arfliw]

Sounds like Norway.

[sergiosgc]

Portugal

[thinkpad20]

Preposterous, perhaps, but it also creates a class of people who can afford to break laws.

[kybernetyk]

If swedish bankruptcy law is anything similar to the German then he possibly can not. (Liabilities resulting from criminal action are not covered by bankruptcy laws.)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

We have something like that here in the United States... bankruptcy won't clear student loans.

[belorn]

One can not file for personal bankruptcy or "skuldsanering" for this situation. Both of those are for non-criminal situation, and has also additional requirements attached to them.

The damages from a criminal case expire once Statute of limitations hits in, which is in this case 5 years (based on copyright infringement maximum jail time). I do not know when the timer starts to tick, but I would assume it starts once he is serving his sentence.

http://lawline.se/answers/9089

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preskription

[kaugesaar]

He probably can. 5 years with living wage and he would be debt free. If he has filled for bankruptcy before (which I don't know) he might be denied the chance again.

// Swedish

[yuhong]

They will most likely appeal I think.

[erikano]

Off topic, but I just wanted to point out that Google Translate is really great. The quality of this translation is probably better than many human non-professional-translators would write.

[aeflash]

I think Swedish to English is pretty easy to do automatically to some satisfaction -- there are a lot of similarities in grammar and most words have direct translations. Chinese to English or Japanese to English with that level of clarity would be much more impressive.

[_delirium]

The short sentences and relatively simple grammar also remove a lot of the common sources of intelligibility-threatening Google Translate errors. With German->English the most common serious error I find is that it'll unwind a compound sentence the wrong way: matches up verbs with the wrong clauses, orders clauses in an order that ends up nonsensical in English, etc. Scandinavian languages don't tend to use complex, multi-clause sentence constructions, so there's less opportunity to completely screw up the structure.

[thaumasiotes]

Google translate is completely worthless between chinese and english (either direction). I'm baffled every time I see people praising it.

[BorisMelnik]

I was just thinking about how exceptionally well this article was translated. More often than not I can't even understand the gist of what the translation is. Maybe some languages are better than others.

[negativity]

...or perhaps a certain threshold of translation requests triggers a flag on the resource, and it's regarded as a high-traffic asset, and gets queued for mechanical turk translation and review by a professional translation service?

[gedrap]

I just tried translating Lithuanian -> English. Yup Google Translate is that good. Even for not wide spread languages like Lithuanian.

[userbinator]

Quite good for Google translate. There's some odd words like "kväljer" but overall the meaning is pretty clear.

[nissehulth]

That word doesn't make any sense in the Swedish original either. Seems like they botched the quote, can't even guess what he really said.