Cambodian authorities have confirmed over the weekend the arrest of Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who has been in hiding since his popular file-sharing site started encountering legal woes in 2009.
Mr Warg, according to Cambodia's government spokesman Kirth Chantharith, was arrested in Phnom Penh, the country's capital, by local police officers who were acting at the behest of the Swedish government.
"His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology," Mr Chantharith told Agence France Presse (AFP).
He hinted though that the top Pirate Bay figure could not be automatically deported to his home country as "we don't have an extradition treaty with Sweden."
"But we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case," the Cambodian government official added.
The arrest, according to BBC, was also confirmed by Mr Warg's former defence lawyer, Ola Salomonsson.
Mr Warg is part of the Pirate Bay core group that started the file-sharing website in 2003 and has attracted millions of global users that uploaded and downloaded large files of movie, music and softwares for free access of everyone.
The site, PirateBay.org, has been chased out of Sweden six years ago but continues to operate from another location with the domain name PirateBay.se.
CNET identified his colleagues as Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom who were meted out fines and jail terms by a Swedish court three years ago for violation of the international copyright laws.
The same court also required Mr Warg and his Pirate Bay co-founders to pay $US4.4 million, which was later hiked to $US6.57 in exchange for lower prison time, according to reports by The Register on Sunday.
Yet while his cohorts appealed the case, Mr Warg dropped out of sight in November 2011 and skipped court appearance when the Swedish High Court affirmed his conviction in February 2012.
His detention was reported as governments heightened their crackdown against websites accused of facilitating illegal online activities such as gambling, financial scam, porn and illegal file-sharing sites.
Earlier in the year, U.S. authorities worked with the New Zealand police to arrest Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, which led to the closing down of his popular online storage global services.
Megaupload, according to the FBI, was actually employed in pilfering digital contents from U.S. producers, leading to revenue losses of up to $500 million.
In August, popular BitTorrent site Demonoid was closed down when the Ukrainian government cooperated with U.S. authorities, with the former labelling its move as a gift to Washington.
Tech watchers have been expecting that other similar site like Pirate Bay will soon suffer the same fate inflicted on Megaupload and Demonoid as the United States ramp up its efforts to clamp down on global operators that greatly contribute to huge losses being absorbed by U.S. copyright owners.
1 comment:
The Swedish government has requested to Cambodian government to arrest of Pirate Bay Co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg despite both countries don't have an extradition treaty. However, Swedish authority will arrest a fugitive Pang Sokheoun, nickname: Kolbot, named in facebook Khmer Sovannaphumi to Cambodia.
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