Pirate Bay defendant Peter Sunde Kolmissoppi is having a rough week. As if the looming threat of a year in jail and a large fine weren't enough to give anyone a permanent case of "the Mondays," Kolmisoppi had his bag stolen at a conference. Luckily, he got it back. "Money was still there, my PC was still there," he tweeted. "Things missing: Underwear and a tshirt. Pervert thief? Fun!"

Good thing the money came back, too, since Kolmisoppi and his merry band now find themselves the recipients of debt collection letters from the wonderfully named Kronofogdemyndigheten. This government agency operates like a national cash collector, grabbing not just money owed the government, but also helping private citizens and businesses collect money owed to them.

Kronofogdemyndigheten now wants about half the total fine owed from The Pirate Bay trial, and it plans to freeze the bank accounts of the defendants until it gets paid. Not that this worries the saucy pirates; Kolmisoppi put his letter through the shredder as soon as he got it.

The Pirate Bay defendants have always claimed to have no money, with most of the dough TPB brings in being poured into website expenses and hardware upgrades. The fourth defendant, crisp bread heir Carl Lundstr�m, may end up paying far more than his fair share, since the fine was applied jointly to all four defendants.

The attempt to collect the fine comes even as the case is being appealed and new questions have surfaced about the judge's involvement with a pair of pro-copyright societies. The issue of the judge's possible bias has been big news in Sweden, where newspapers have verified (English account) that judge Tomas Norstr�m belongs to lobby groups that are explicitly pro-copyright and pro-rightsholder.

A higher Swedish court is currently considering whether the judge's affiliations are grounds for a retrial—which, unlike an appeal, would restart the entire "spectrial" from the beginning. The thought of going through so much weirdness again is almost too wonderfully horrible to contemplate, but one suspects that the thought of throwing the Swedish justice system into an uproar (again) is one that The Pirate Bay admins enjoy nearly as much as BitTorrent.