GeekTime Swedish file sharing website The Pirate Bay has been promoting bands, game developers and filmmakers on its homepage since it relaunched its Promo Bay initiative in October to support independent artists. This week, however, TPB has chosen to promote a more personal cause, and has posted a banner asking visitors to send support to the site’s founders who are now in jail due to their involvement with TPB and their alleged promotion of copyright infringement, as pointed out by Ernesto Van Der Sar of TorrentFreak.

Two of TPB’s original founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde are in prison, the banner notes. “Show your support by sending them some encouraging mail! Gottfrid is only allowed to receive letters while Peter gladly receives books, letters and vegan candy.”

Imprisoned pirates

Sunde and Svartholm, along with other TPB co-founders Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström, were found guilty of copyright infringement by the District Court of Stockholm, Sweden on April 17, 2009. The court sentenced the founders to one year in prison and a fine of 30 million SEK (about €2.7 million or US$3.5 million). The defendants all appealed the verdict, which was upheld in November 2010, although the prison sentences were shortened and the damages were increased. The Supreme Court of Sweden in February 2012 also ruled that TPB had to change its domain the thepiratebay.se from thepiratebay.org.

According to TorrentFreak, Sunde is now serving the sentence he received from that trial and is being held in a high security prison in Västervik, although he recently requested a transfer to a lower safety class unit. Svartholm already serviced his TPB sentence, but he has been accused in Denmark of hacking into the mainframe computers of IT company CSC. His new trial starts in two months and he faces five years in prison.

When in prison for TPB sentence, Svartholm received numerous letters and cards and made a video to thank his supporters, saying that the support has meant a lot to him and helped him a lot.

TPB is the world’s largest bittorrent tracker. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol for fast file transfers and allows for the sharing of movies and music online. However, the site is designed so that it doesn’t actually hold copyright materials.

“Only torrent files are saved at the server,” TPB wrote on its site. “That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site.”

The Swedish company was founded in late 2003 by anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån, but became its own entity in October 2004.