Gottfrid Svartholm, the imprisoned co-founder of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, has been served with a slew of lawsuits by some of Russia’s biggest content providers for registering and hosting several of the country’s most popular torrent websites.

Russian media giants VGTRK and Gazprom Media are among the companies that have submitted a total of eight lawsuits against two sites, Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv, for violating their copyright. Among the programs hosted on the sites – the first of which is among the top 30 most popular destinations for Russian internet users – are international hit series such as Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, as well as top Russian series.



Svartholm is listed as the registrant – the domain name owner – of both sites. Moreover, his hosting company PRQ, which was once the home to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, is also listed as the host for the copyrighted material.



Moscow City Court has accepted four of the eight lawsuits, and is considering the others. All of the legal claims fall under a broad and powerful copyright law passed by the Russian Duma earlier this year, meaning that a victory for the defendant is unlikely.



“Rights holders do not care at all about who is the ultimate owner of the illegal website, as this is irrelevant to blocking illegal content,” a lawyer for one of the plaintiff’s told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, when asked about whether Svartholm was deliberately targeted.



Svartholm, who did not have a legal representative present in court and did not issue any comment to the press, is currently serving a one year jail term in Sweden, where his computer was allegedly used to hack into the records of Swedish bank Nordea. On Wednesday he will be extradited to Denmark, where he faces a similar lawsuit that could leave in him in jail for up to six years.

