The outspoken founder of the music-sharing site on life behind bars, and whether jail time has made him reconsider his views

The Västervik prison is as ugly as its surroundings are beautiful. Located a stone’s throw from the water in Gertrudsvik, a few hours drive south of Stockholm, its pale concrete walls rise high above the summer homes and wooden jetties dotting the coastline. Tall steel fences encircle the building, topped with heavy loops of razor-sharp barbed wire.



After emptying our pockets and passing through the metal detectors, a guard escorts us through a maze of dark corridors leading up to a visitor’s room.

As the door swings open, Peter Sunde rises hurriedly from his chair. He is dressed in standard-issue prison clothes - a faded grey cotton tracksuit. His cheeks are stubbled and there are dark circles under his eyes. He looks a world away from the outspoken, impish provocateur that has spent the past decade building his reputation as the entertainment industry’s enemy number one. But his face lights up when we shake hands.

Above all else, he is shockingly thin. His Adam’s apple bobs visibly up and down when he tells us about his weight loss.

“I’m down 16kg so far. But it’s slowed down. There isn’t much left,” he says, running his fingers over his ribcage.

Sunde declines to be photographed. “There are no mirrors in here,” he says, half-jokingly. But there is more to his refusal than that. A photo taken of him here - behind bars, underweight and dressed in grey prison garb - will likely haunt him for the rest of his life. “I don’t know how I’ll feel in three years, looking back at all this,” he says. Eventually, he agrees to an exception. He will allow his picture to be taken, provided he can cover his face with a blank piece of paper. “I’m thinking people can fill in whatever they want. Just like they do with The Pirate Bay,” he says.

In 2009, the founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious file-sharing site, were found guilty of copyright offences in Sweden. After being internationally wanted for two years, Sunde was arrested and transported to jail.

Sunde, who is expected to be released in November, asks us to sit at the small, round table next to the barred window. In front of us, there is instant coffee, a few paper cups and a crumpled plastic bag with homemade chocolate muffins. He offers us a bite.

“They’re made by a cocaine smuggler. They’re 100% vegan,” he says.

‘The policeman was so pissed’

On Saturday 31 May 2014, Sunde was relaxing at his girlfriend’s house just outside Malmö in southern Sweden. Around lunchtime someone knocked on the door. Sunde was alone in the house so he opened up. He was greeted by a man in civilian clothing.

“Peter?” the man asked.

Sunde suspected that the visit wasn’t friendly and did his best not to confirm his identity, with either words or expressions. The strategy failed. “You are under arrest.”

Two years had passed since the Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for him. Now, a small group of policemen had arrived to take him to prison, where he was to serve the sentence handed down to him by a Swedish court in 2010.

Sunde asked to call his girlfriend. Someone had to take care of the house if he was to leave, he reasoned. One of the two cops nodded. Sunde pulled out his phone and dialled a number.

But as the signals went through, he kept fingering on the phone screen. A quick tap on an app icon, then another one. The phone sent out a signal over the internet, to all his computers at home and at work: “Shut down, immediately.” Then he quickly switched off his cellphone.

“Everything was encrypted,” Sunde tells us, clearly pleased with himself. “The policeman was so pissed. I guess he’d been looking forward to arresting this mastermind hacker and then he misses a thing like that.”

Peter “brokep” Sunde’s arrest made headlines all over the world. Now only one of the three founders of The Pirate Bay - Fredrik “TiAMO” Neij - remained at large. Gottfrid “anakata” Svartholm Warg had beeen arrested in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in August 2012, on unrelated hacking charges.

When the story reached the papers the next morning, Sunde was already behind bars. The police first brought him to prison in Malmö, where he remained for a week, then transferred him to his current whereabouts. Västervik is a class two prison, the second highest rating in Sweden. Many of its inmates have commited violent or drug-related offences. Sunde is serving time for aiding and abetting copyright crimes.

We ask Sunde about a typical day in prison. He quickly rattles off his schedule: breakfast at 7am. Lunch at 11:30. Dinner at 4:15 PM. “Then you sleep.”

He tells us about the other inmates. In the prison with him is a man (“a voodoo doctor”) who assaulted a 14-year-old girl to “drive the devil out of her”. Another man murdered his partner with 60 stab wounds to the stomach. And the cocaine smuggler who made our chocolate muffins.

“He’s the guy I hang out with most,” Sunde says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inmates at Västervik prison Photograph: Kriminalvården

The hour he is allowed to spend outdoors each day is a highlight. Sunde points out of the barred window behind us towards a fenced-in gravel field a few yards away. Behind the barbed wire is a patch of green grass and a volleyball net, he says.

At7pm, cell doors are closed and locked. After that, Sunde has only his television set and the books in his cell to entertain him. He hasn’t been online since he was arrested, he says. At 9pm, lights are turned off.





‘I’ve signed a few autographs’

Do the others in prison know who he is? Sure, he says. “I’ve signed a few autographs. Some of the guards have asked me what kind of computer they should buy. I’ve been distilled to this computer nerd,” he says.

He receives letters from all over the world. Some people send him 50 pages of conspiracy theories. Others are content with a short note to say good luck. “Some guy wrote and thanked me for all the porn he’d downloaded,” says Sunde.

Sunde does not work during the daytime, as many other inmates do. Instead, he has been given a textbook in Spanish. Formally, that means he is pursuing studies while in jail. That pays him SEK 13 an hour, money that he is free to spend on phone credit, fruit or food in the prison kiosk.

Food is a big problem. Sunde is a vegan, which greatly limits what he can eat from the sparse menu on offer. Since two months back, he is given medication to counteract iron and vitamin deficiencies.

“I mostly eat lettuce. I’ve been nagging them for a bottle of olive oil. It took seven weeks, but once I got them to stock some avocadoes in the kiosk,” he says.





Facebook Twitter Pinterest Västervik prison Photograph: Kriminalvården

When talking about how he is treated in prison, Sunde’s voice changes. His tone is reminiscent of how he sounded when we interviewed him several years ago, when the debate on online piracy was white hot and The Pirate Bay was at its most influential.



Then, Sunde took every opportunity to rail against online censorship and the methods used by the film and music industries in their fight against filesharers. He was the figurehead for a rebellious movement that feared neither Hollywood lawyers nor Swedish prosecutors.

But in the cell at Västervik, the fight against the film and music industries is a world away. Instead, Sunde directs his anger towards the Swedish penal system.

How much did Sunde and the others make from The Pirate Bay? Very little, according to the founders. Sunde has always maintained that whatever money came in was spent on servers and maintenance.

It’s a difficult claim to swallow. The Pirate Bay was, and still is, one of the most visited websites in the world. It’s also plastered with ads that someone presumably is paying good money for. But the fact is that nobody has been able to find any money to speak of. Even the prosecutor, Håkan Roswall, only claimed a total of about SEK 1.2m in court. That’s peanuts, considering the traffic volume that pours through The Pirate Bay each day.

In the eyes of his opposition, Sunde was nothing but a simple thief. Piracy was a result of stinginess on the part of the filesharers, and the men running The Pirate Bay were only in it for the money, they argued. All such accusations were met with cocky and profane retorts from Sunde and his co-founders. “It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomise yourself with retractable batons,” Warg once wrote in response to a takedown notice from Dreamworks SKG.

A few days before our visit, Sunde’s brother, the author Mats Kolmisoppi, wrote a long Facebook post about his brother’s life at Västervik. His post went viral and was picked up by major newspaper. In it, he tells of enforced urine samples and humiliating body searches. How inmates are routinely locked up too early in the evening (so that guards won’t have to work overtime), are denied parole and subject to derisive comments from prison staff.

‘Inmates are deprived of their humanity’

Many of the claims are impossible to confirm. As a rule, the Swedish prison authorities won’t comment on individual inmates. That does not stop Sunde from talking, at length, about the ills he sees around him . Prison inmates are “deprived of their humanity,” he says.

He talks about his first leave. He was told that it had been granted on the same day, at quarter to nine in the morning, 15 minutes before the guards were due to pick him up. “I wanted to meet my family to talk about the future. It was impossible. They can’t get to Västervik in 15 minutes.”





The authorities at Västervik declined to comment on Sunde’s claims, but tell us that it isn’t improbable that an inmate has “a decision announced on the day requested”.

What is most difficult to cope with is the boredom, Sunde says. The days in prison merge into a grey mass, indistinguishable from each other. Sunde has trouble sleeping at night. “You become brain-dead in here,” he says. “A guy who has been here a long time said it best: what I miss most are new memories.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Västervik prison Photograph: Kriminalvården



A few weeks before our visit, Sunde’s father died after a period of illness. During the summer, Sunde was granted parole to visit him one last time. The week before we meet him, he attended the funeral. He carried the coffin, along with his brother, and said his goodbyes. Afterwards, he was promptly transported back to his cell.

Since then, Sunde has stopped trying to get his sentence truncated. Previously, he worked hard for permission to serve the last months at home, with electronic monitoring. He wrote letters demanding a response from the authorities. Now, he has decided he may as well remain at Västervik. Most likely, he will be released in November.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. The reason I wanted to get out was to spend time with my father. But my father is dead now.”

Almost 11 years have passed since The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious file-sharing site, was founded. Things took an abrupt turn in May 2006, when Swedish police stormed into the hosting firm in southern Stockholm where The Pirate Bay servers were. The raid marked the beginning of a lengthy legal process against the site’s three founders and their financier Carl Lundström.

When the district court’s ruling fell in 2009, Sunde posed in a live video online. Wearing a baseball cap askew, he held up a piece of paper to the camera: “I owe u 31,000,000 SEK” it said. The court of appeal later changed the amount to SEK 46m . Sunde was sentenced to eight months in prison.

After the verdict, Neij moved to Laos. Warg settled in Cambodia, where he was later arrested.

Sunde was the only one who remained in the spotlight. He spent a lot of time travelling, speaking at conferences in the US and Latin America. He founded the company Flattr, which is developing a service for online micropayments. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about online mass surveillance, he announced Heml.is, an encrypted messaging app that is supposedly impossible to eavesdrop on. It had been years since he had anything to do with The Pirate Bay, Sunde claims. The identity of whoever manages the site today is a closely guarded secret.

We last met him most recently in the autumn of 2012. Sunde had no fixed place of residence and no official income, he told us then. All his assets were to be seized to pay back the damages he owed the film and music industry. In a way, he was already on the run from the police, but he was never very secretive about his whereabouts. Had he received a letter with demands to show up at prison? Had the police tried to call him? Sunde didn’t know, he said. He refused to call the police himself, asking for instructions.

“They haven’t exactly been fair to me this far. If it happens, it happens, but I won’t make things worse for myself,” Sunde told us then.





Messing with the system

And here we are, a couple of years later, in the room at Västervik. The police raid against The Pirate Bay lies eight years in the past. Looking back, it is clear that Sunde and his co-founders pushed forward the public debate on copyright and freedom of information. Illegal filesharing, spearheaded by The Pirate Bay, arguably functioned as a catalyst for legal streaming services and fueled the birth of for several Pirate Parties in countries across the world. In the European parliament elections of summer 2009, a few months after The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to jail, the Swedish Pirate Party secured 7.1% of the vote.

Many people who then took an active part in the debate on software piracy, some of them close friends of Sunde, are now renowned academics who have made names for themselves as proponents of copyright reform. But few ever translated their words into action to the same extent as Sunde, Neij and Svartholm Warg did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij (left), Gottfrid Svartholm (centre) and Peter Sunde leave the city court after their copyright trial in Stockholm, 2009. Photograph: Bob Strong / Reuters/REUTERS

Today, the debate has largely moved on. The spotlight is on a new generation of legal, commercial services. Netflix, Spotify and others have filled the void once inhabited by illegal filesharing services. The Swedish Pirate party managed a paltry 2.2% of the vote in the European parliament elections of 2014.

But filesharing has not gone away. After our interview, we visit thepiratebay.org and click on the statistics page. At that moment, 52 million users are sharing films, music and other software through torrents available on the site.



Back in the prison cell, Sunde is at his most energetic when we talk about how he has been messing with the prison system. His applications for parole is a favorite he returns to: The more applications were rejected, the more he kept submitting. Eventually, he sent in 70 separate applications all at once. One for each day he would be willing to leave the prison (meaning all the days he had left to serve).

Using an old computer , he printed out 70 separate letters, identical except for the date requested, and mailed them to the authorities. Not that he had any great faith that they would be approved. It was a show of defiance.

“It’ll take them about 20 minutes to handle each piece of paper,” he says, smiling.

He retains his energy when we ask him about his plans for life after jail. He talks about working with WikiLeaks, about continuing his work on the app Heml.is. He has plans for a documentary television series, he tells us, in which he will travel around the world helping various activist groups. Disrupting whale hunters in Japan one week, helping fugitives make their way across heavily guarded borders the next.

He doesn’t seem very interested in software piracy. In fact, he has wanted to put The Pirate Bay behind him for years. “Just set fire to the servers and that’ll be the end of it,” he told us when we met him in 2010.

Does that mean he now regrets what he once did? Perhaps putting his name and picture to the world’s largest filesharing site wasn’t such a good idea. Have the nights and days spent in prison so far made Sunde reconsider?

“No. Not at all,” he says. “The verdict was ridiculous, and it is as ridiculous today as it was then.”

“People ask if I would have done anything different if I could. The answer is no. This has been nothing more than five months of wasted time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pirate Bay’s first server is displayed at the Technical Museum in Stockholm in 2009. Photograph: Scanpix Sweden/REUTERS

Timeline

2003 The Pirate Bureau sets up a bittorrent-tracker, later named The Pirate Bay. It grows to become one of the largest file-sharing sites on the internet.

2006 Motion Picture Association of America contacts the Swedish Ministry of Justice, asking them to take action against The Pirate Bay. This is a very sensitive issue in Sweden, where ministers are strictly forbidden to directly intervene in how government agencies, such as the police, handle specific cases. The legal term is “ministerial rule”. Police raid the data center where The Pirate Bay is hosted. The servers are taken offline and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij are taken in for questioning. Three days later, The Pirate Bay is back online. Minister for Justice Thomas Bodström is accused of ministerial rule following the raid, but the allegations are dismissed.

2008 Sunde, Warg, Neij and Lundström are charged with copyright offenses. The police officer responsible for the investigation into the Pirate Bay accepts a new job with Warner Brothers, one of the claimants in the case.

2009 A district court sentences Sunde, Warg, Neij and Lundström to one year in prison and a total of 31m Swedish kronor in damages. The defendants appeal against the verdict. Tomas Norström, the presiding judge in the district court, is accused of bias after it emerges that he is affiliated with a Swedish pro-copyright organisation. Other members of the same group are employed by the film and music industries.

2010 The royal court gives its verdict in the Pirate Bay case. The four defendants see their prison terms shortened, but the damages increased to a total of more than $7m . The defendants again appeal the verdict.

2012 The high court declines to take up the case on appeal. Warg is arrested in Cambodia on unrelated hacking charges and transported back to Sweden. Neij and Lundström declare personal bankruptcy. Lundström serves his prison sentence at home, with an electronic tag. With interest, the site’s founders owe roughly $11m.

2014 After being wanted by the Interpol for two years, Peter Sunde is arrested in southern Sweden and transported to jail. He is currently serving time at Västervik prison until November 2014.





Daniel Goldberg (@danielg0ldberg) and Linus Larsson (@linuslarsson) are writers based in Stockholm, Sweden. Their first English-language book, “Minecraft: The unlikely tale of Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and the game that changed everything”, published by Seven Stories Press, is available now.