A co-founder of the Pirate Bay has been released from prison after serving three years for copyright and hacking offences.

Gottfrid Svartholm was initially convicted in 2011, when his involvement with the bittorrent site led to a one-year prison sentence handed down in Stockholm, Sweden. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, had been found guilty in absentia alongside three of his Pirate Bay colleagues for copyright infringement. He had avoided the trial, and no-one, including his lawyer, knew his whereabouts.

Svartholm was later arrested in Cambodia in 2012, and transferred to Sweden to serve out his sentence. But in 2013, he was again charged and found guilty of hacking and fraud offences, leading to a further two years on his prison sentence. He appealed, and was cleared of one specific charge of hacking a bank, but a second conviction for hacking IT company Logica was upheld. As a result, his second sentence was reduced from two years to one.

As that sentence was coming to an end, Svartholm was extradited to Denmark where he again stood trial for hacking offences. He was convicted and sentenced to another three and a half years in prison.

He was released early for good behaviour in August, but promptly re-arrested upon his release and extradited back to Sweden, where he still had one final month of his hacking conviction to serve out in that country.

In June, as he faced release in Sweden, his mother told industry news site TorrentFreak that “what Gottfrid wants to do now, more than anything else, is to get back to his developmental work within IT”.

She added: “And, of course, first of all: to sit by a keyboard again after nearly three years away from one.”

With Svartholm’s release, all of the original co-founders of the Pirate Bay are now free. Peter Sunde had been arrested after Svartholm, but released from jail before him after serving his sentence in Västervik prison, south of Stockholm, while the last of the group, Fredrik Neij - known as TiAMO online – was arrested in Thailand in 2014.