The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg will be deported from Cambodia.
A police official today announced that Warg will be deported “based on our immigration law.” Reuters, which was first to report on the story, said that the spokesperson, Kirth Chantharith, claimed the decision was made after holding discussions with Sweden officials.
Warg was arrested on Thursday by Cambodian police in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. The arrest is believed to relate to his trouble with Sweden courts, which found him, along with his three Pirate Bay cohorts, guilty in 2009 of creating 33 copyright-protected files for downloading on Piratebay.org. After failing to show up at a hearing on the matter, he went missing — until now.
According to Reuters, Cambodia is not saying where it’ll send Warg. However, the country and Sweden do not have an extradition agreement, which means he can’t be sent there. Chantharith reportedly said, however, that Sweden will decide where he’ll go next.
If Warg eventually finds his way back to Sweden, he’ll likely face time in jail. In 2009, after being found guilty of pirating, the four Pirate Bay co-founders were sentenced to a year in prison.
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, who was the former co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde.
Warg has also created the tracker software Hypercube, an open source software which was used to run The Pirate Bay web site and tracker.
On 31 January 2008, The Pirate Bay operators — Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström (CEO of The Pirate Bay’s former ISP) — were charged with “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws”.
The trial began on 16 February 2009. On 17 April 2009, Sunde and his co-defendants were found to be guilty of “assisting in making copyright content available” in the Stockholm district court (tingsrätten).
