pirating

Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is being released from solitary confinement and moved to a different prison in Sweden to finish his sentence tied to his role in illegal file-sharing.

According to torrent site TorrentFreak, Warg is due in May to finish a sentence for his role in running The Pirate Bay, a resource for finding torrent files that can be used to download both legal and illegal content.

His detainment in solitary confinement apparently wasn't tied to the Pirate Bay case specifically. When he was deported from Cambodia to Sweden this summer, Warg was accused of hacking … Read more

Sweden is investigating one of the four cofounders of The Pirate Bay for alleged fraud, according to published reports.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was already in custody in Sweden for allegedly hacking into the computer servers of Logica, a company based in Sweden that handles sensitive tax documents. According to a report in ComputerWorld, the new crimes in which Warg is suspect, which also includes a separate illegal computer intrusion, are not associated with the previous investigation.

Warg and the other Pirate Bay cofounders also have a conviction in Sweden for criminal copyright violations hanging over their heads.

Warg was living … Read more

In the midst of threats of a possible police raid, the Pirate Bay decided to armor itself and become literally raid-proof. It's ditched its servers and moved to several cloud-hosting providers in different countries around the world.

"Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud," the Pirate Bay wrote in a blog post. "Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into … Read more

Mitt Romney ruffled a few feathers during the first presidential debate with suggestions that days may be numbered for Big Bird of "Sesame Street" fame, hatching a social media backlash and in turn illustrating the power of sites like Twitter in politics.

A number of satirical Big Bird accounts popped up on Twitter after the Republican presidential nominee implied the famed yellow bird would meet an untimely demise, along with PBS subsidies, if he were elected president.

"100 Retweets and I'm going to make my nest outside Romney's bedroom window," read one tweet from … Read more

The Swedish police seem to be going straight to the source in their battle against copyright infringement. According to Forbes, the country's authorities raided the Stolckholm-based Web host PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet, including the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, and the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central.

It's unclear why police raided PRQ, but its owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24 that he believes the investigation had to do with intellectual property violations, according to TorrentFreak. Viborg also … Read more

The Canadian government wishes to inform its citizens that despite appearances, encouraging the downloading of pirated movies and music is not, actually, part of the country's Economic Action Plan.

The government's Department of Finance has temporarily pulled Web ads for the plan after the banners appeared on the notorious Pirate Bay site, the Ottawa Citizen reported this week.

It's not clear how the banners, bearing the tagline "Find out what's in it for you," wound up on The Pirate Bay alongside low-rent ads for gambling businesses, dating sites, "Find a Chinese bride" … Read more

Swedish police arrested Gottfried Svartholm Warg today as soon as he stepped off the plane from Cambodia.

Warg, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the best known file-sharing services on the Web, is accused of hacking into the servers of a company that supplies IT services for some of Sweden's tax services and making off with records belonging to thousands of people, according to Swedish news publication Aftonbladet.

Up until late last week, it was believed that Warg had been detained by police in Cambodia because of his conviction in Sweden on copyright charges. In … Read more

It seems like Google is finally complying with the Recording Industry Association of America's wishes by not showing alleged copyright infringing Web sites in its Instant and Autocomplete search features.

According to TorrentFreak, the search giant just added the Pirate Bay to its censorship list.

Now, when users type "thepiratebay.org" or any of the site's other domain names into their search box, nothing relating to the Pirate Bay's Web site pops up. However, the file-sharing site is still indexed in Google's overall search function.

The RIAA has been working hard over the past … Read more

The circumstances surrounding the arrest of Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfried Svartholm Warg become more mysterious each day.

The latest report from Swedish publication DN.se, is that Warg's arrest in Cambodia nearly two weeks ago had nothing to do with his conviction on copyright violations but is linked to an alleged hacking of Logica, a Swedish company that provides IT services to that country's tax offices.

News that Warg was arrested didn't come as much of a surprise. Warg appeared to flee Sweden shortly after he and three other Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year … Read more